Frang

Story time with greymuzzle Frang:

Back when I was an undergrad at university.. you know.. in the Dark Ages..

I would frequently take jobs being a computer "lab rat". At this time, that was a person who's 'job' was to be present in the computer lab (usually just a collection of some type of computers or terminals in a room somewhere). You needed to make sure people weren't doing anything to damage the equipment. You were also the first tier of tech support.

So one got really good at triaging and diagnosing problems you've never seen before.

Now add to this that students using the lab would also try to get you to help them solve whatever problem they were working on. Or, as is relevant to this tale, debug their code.

So one of the 'lab rat' jobs I had was to watch over a small computer lab for people that were on track to be future mathematics teachers. This is no slight on them for their goals, but more to indicate that their expertise and accumulating experience were in explaining mathematics, and not programming. That's what I was there for.

So I'm in the lab one evening, puttering away on whatever it was I was interesting in at the time (likely a rendering library for an Apple //gs). The students in the lab were working on a problem that as supposed to have them 'simulate' a process of dropping pins across two parallel lines. The end result is expected to converge to pi. Sure, cool.

There is one student who come in shortly after the lab opened and was there very late. He finally gets frustrated enough to ask if I can help him debug his code. I'm all to willing to do so. I let him know that I don't know the details of the problem he is supposed to solve, and that I can't do his lab for him. But other than that, I'm here to help!

Did you know BASIC is _super_ popular with a particular subset of mathematicians back then? Yep.

So he has about 40 lines of BASIC, so nothing too bad. Most of it looks pretty rational. Most of it. Except for 2 lines.

I remind him that I don't know exactly what his problem is, but _these_ two lines (specifically) look.. ... weird. He looks at what I'm pointing at, and after a moment the light goes on and he sees the problem. Sure enough his code works after fixing that.

Professional code touchers will recognize this as a form of "code smell", with a side dish of "teddy-bear debugging". Do not underestimate these things. Properly applied, they work _very_ effectively. Even with minimal information.