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I finally tried "just Google it" on my own code and it made me worse at debugging
My buddy at a meetup in Denver swore that pasting error messages into Google is all a beginner needs, but after doing that for 3 weeks I could not explain why my own loop was broken without a search result. Last Tuesday I sat with a Python file for 40 minutes and traced it with print statements instead, and found the off by one on line 12 myself. Anyone else find that leaning on search engines early on keeps you from learning to read your own code?
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victor_clark6015d ago
The "could not explain why my own loop was broken" part is the real killer. Here's the angle nobody talks about: searching error messages actually trains you to trust the computer's words over your own eyes. You start seeing "IndexError" and your brain jumps straight to the search bar instead of just counting how many times the loop runs. My fix was forcing myself to say the bug out loud in plain English first, like "the list has 5 things and I'm asking for thing number 6," and half the time I'd catch it before typing anything.
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