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Here is a question from reader cody:

Me and my brother got into an argument recently and I figured you could help us settle it. It started when an update for Minecraft was released that caused the game to crash when shift clicking items into a full inventory. He thought this was incompetent coding on behalf of the developers and that any problem like that would be obvious and easy to fix. I told him that it's a lot more subtle than that and any number of seemingly insignificant bits of code could break the game in major ways. In the end we both agreed that computers only do exactly what you tell them to, our opinions on what that means are different though. He thinks that it means if you tell them to do something that breaks the game you're bad at making games.

There’s an old saying among writers: Writing is re-writing. The real work isn’t having an idea or putting the words down, the real work is when you’re done with that and you have to go back and polish, cut, and expand until the work flows.

There’s a parallel saying for software engineers: Programming is debugging. Yes, a terrible programmer will write bad code. But a normal programmer and an exceptional programmer will write good code. The difference between the two appears when it comes time to locate an obscure bug or intuit the source of a problem based on the non-technical ramblings of an end user. A task like that can take a day or five minutes, and it all comes down to how deeply the programmer understands the discipline.

Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ask Me a Question: Software Bugs”

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.