Debugging is not less important


In my programming circle, I’ve encountered many programmers who give most of their attention to debugging software bugs. And this is not bad, but not enough to be efficient. Efficiency includes both preventing possible bugs and removing existent one.

Let me explain what programming and debugging are with a doctor-patient analogy, which I’ve just made out.

As we all know, to be healthy the first thing we must do is not eating too much and junk food, doing enough exercise, not smoking, and not drinking too much drink. The list may vary for each individual. Even though we do all these, it is always possible to be ill.

In view of possibility of being ill, we always require doctor to be around in case of anything.

For example, not to be a diabetic you need control your eating. But does the controlling make medical improvement against diabetes unnecessary? Not at all. We need enough efficient cure to diabetes, so medical and science works on this. We need doctors.

Analogously, in software development , we have to learn how to prevent bugs at first, and then how to track down and debug them.

In contrast to the doctor-patient analogy, programmer is both the patient and the doctor.

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