I really enjoy programming, for much the same reasons that I really enjoy knitting. Knitting complicated lace has a great deal in common with programming, although many people who knit wouldn't believe it, being self-declared computer-phobes.
The problems in programming that most often give me headaches are the kind that arise from trying to put different people's work together. Picture a piece of lace knitting handed to you already started by someone else. They give you a bunch of live stitches and a verbal description of what the lace pattern already done looks like. Your task, should you choose to accept it, is to knit some more lace pattern onto the shawl already started and make it look like it belongs there.
I've been wrestling with a problem for the past couple of days that turns out to stem from the fact that Person A wrote some code that Person B wrote some more code for and I have to make my stuff work with Person B's code. But there's a bug in between Person A's and Person B's code. AND, it wasn't obvious that I was dealing with a Person A at all - that part wasn't specified. So, it turns out the answer is to ignore Person B's code, go back and only use Person A's code, and voila, my code works with Person A's code just fine. It only took two days of wasted effort to get to this point.
There is a reason why I don't wait until the last minute to do my homework assignments. If I were looking at this on the last day before it was due, I'd be hysterical at this point.
2 comments:
Whaaaa?
Which part of it? ;-)
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