debugging

• In the good old days physicists repeated each other's experiments, just to be sure. Today they stick to FORTRAN, so that they can share each other's programs, bugs included.

  — Edsger W. Dijkstra

• The wise man who has charge of governing the empire should know the cause of disorder before he can put it in order. Unless he knows its cause, he cannot regulate it.

  — Mozi

• Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.

  — Donald Knuth

• Much to the surprise of the builders of the first digital computers, programs written for them usually did not work.

  — Rodney Brooks

• If you want more effective programmers, you will discover that they should not waste their time debugging, they should not introduce the bugs to start with.

  — Edsger W. Dijkstra

• The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.

  — Richard Feynman

• The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements.

  — Brian Kernighan

• If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.

  — Karl Popper

• Treat the Disease, Not the Symptom.

  — Randy Pausch

• A hallucination is a fact, not an error; what is erroneous is a judgment based upon it.

  — Bertrand Russell

• If you can't detect failures, you are unable to recover from them. That's an obvious principle you need.

  — Joe Armstrong

• The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

  — Thomas Henry Huxley

• Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.

  — Eric S. Raymond

• Program testing can be used to show the presence of bugs, but never to show their absence!

  — Edsger W. Dijkstra

• We have been pulling at the wrong end of the tangle, which has to be unravelled by a different approach. But after a general agreement with observation is established, and the tangle begins to loosen, we should always make ready for the next knot.

  — Arthur Eddington

• A convincing demonstration of correctness being impossible as long as the mechanism is regarded as a black box, our only hope lies in not regarding the mechanism as a black box.

  — Edsger W. Dijkstra

• Every system that we build will surprise us with new kinds of flaws until those machines become clever enough to conceal their faults from us.

  — Marvin Minsky

• In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.

  — Alfred North Whitehead

• I cannot define the real problem, therefore I suspect there's no real problem, but I'm not sure there's no real problem.

  — Richard Feynman

• Computers are famous for difficulties. A difficulty is just a blockage from progress. You have to try a lot of things. When you finally find what works, it doesn't tell you a thing. It won't be the same tomorrow. Getting the computer to work is so often dealing with difficulties.

  — Ward Cunningham