My first taste of commercial software development came using Adabas / Natural - a data base with a 3GL programming language. There were no debuggers available but it had an interpreted development environment and you could write code and use print statements to debug your code. I was amazed when I was asked by another developer to help fix a bug in his code and observed that they did not use the same debugging technique. This developers debugging technique was to (apparently randomly) choose a line or two of code, change something, and rerun their application to see if the outcome changed. A couple of print statements quickly narrowed down the problem and had their program working. I found my productivity was many times better just because I had mastered that simple debugging technique. It took me minutes to fix a problem rather than days (or never!). One day I volunteered to port an imap implementation to OS/2. I thought that because it was written for Unix and on my OS/2 developmen...
Programming specific thoughts