Which is hard debugging or coding?

Answer 1

Both, if you think about it they're both different forms of problem solving, just one is solving your own problems, the other is solving others problems.

Answer 2

Ig both are same in difficulty level.

Answer 3

Honestly? Both have their difficult parts. In a perfect world, with perfect developers and a perfect language, we'd never need to debug. But that's rarely the case.

We often encounter unforeseen so-called "edge cases". How many times have you heard of some major game releasing with numerous game-breaking bugs? While that can *rarely* be the result of bad programming, it's often equally the cause of not predicting the different environment that occurs in a live game vs the one on the developers' computers.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) aims to somewhat alleviate the problem of having to re-engineer the entire app due to a bug, by arguably placing the "debugging" *first*. In other words, you write the tests that you specifically want the code to pass (assuming they *won't* pass at first), and then you write the code to fit those tests.

Answer 4

Carlos
Debugging is harder than writing code, so if you've been clever in writing code you are by definition not clever enough to debug it.

Answer 5

When you code, you must test it frequently and be very careful. If you don't it in the end you may encounter piles of errors or bugs. Fixing some bugs(Such as when the program has no errors but does not give the required result. look at Martin Taylor comment) is very difficult and you may have to overwrite the whole program.

Answer 6

Me: Ok, let's do it this way
Compiler: Here's the result (unexpected)
Me: Hmm maybe just need to change that one line
Compiler: Here's the result (wrong again)
Me: Ok got a new idea, let's implement it (rewrite the snippet)
Compiler: cursing and spitting out error messages
Me: #$@~%^&*_

Conclusion:
Ideas come and go, what seemed to be so feasible or even correct can turn into an endless debugging time. I end up searching the net for answer, to find out that I was doing it big time wrong, which explains why I got lost and spent a lot of time spinning my head around 😔

Answer 7

Debugging - it doesn't give you the logical and analytical reasoning errors...

Answer 8

Debugging is. Have to go through a lot of trial and error process to get the code working.

Answer 9

Debugging

Answer 10

Debugging

Answer 11

Debugging is more hard.
While coding you only care about the syntax and continue coding.
But while debugging you have to check out all the written code one by one.

Answer 12

Martin Taylor,
I have to disagree on the "amongst the simplest errors to fix" part.

It all comes down to experience, a bunch of error messages can take beginners down easily, where it brings next to no effect to the experienced ones.

Seeing error messages when one had just began learning a new language can be something to remember for long time. it can be a laughing stock later on when more experience has been gained.

And yes, there's still issue with language barrier, where I have to copy parts of the error message to get Google Translate to help me understand.