You will always have more problems than engineers.

How to deal with a sad reality.

Matt Schellhas
Better Programming

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Photo by Adrian Swancar on Unsplash

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?

- Brian Kernighan

It has always been easier to break things than to make things. Software is no different. If anything, software has made it explicit. We can prove there are an infinite number of valid software programs. How many of those actually do what we want, without bugs?

Far fewer (yet amusingly, still infinite).

Even if you ignore all of the bugs that software engineers create themselves, software engineers comprise only about 0.3% of the world’s population. Mother Nature and the other 7.7 billion people aren’t sitting idle. Yes, many of those other folks are solving problems without software, and certainly not all of the problems people create can be solved with software. Yet as companies far and wide try to use technology to solve the world’s ills, they grapple with an inviolable truth: there always will be more problems than engineers.

That has consequences. Kernighan was focused on software design. Simple designs lead to more maintainable software. When software is easier to maintain, it causes…

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