Why don't schools teach debugging? (2014)

"We excitedly explained our newly discovered technique to those around us, walking them through a couple steps. No one had trouble; not even people who’d struggled with every previous assignment. Within an hour, the group of folks within earshot of us had finished, and we went home."

This is great, I wish more people at my school did this, learning should be collaborative (as long as you don't copy paste code). There seems to be an obsession with secrecy and not sharing any ideas on a project as though there is only one way to solve a Java homework problem.

Troubleshooting is really just a special application of general 'problem solving', which is something schools aim to teach. I'm not sure why troubleshooting skills are not taught, especially something like "divide and conquer" [1]. Even in very complex systems, so long as you have the right access/visibility/logging to see what's going on at various places, it usually doesn't take very long to isolate a problem down to a particular component.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troubleshooting#Half-splitting

The thing that makes debugging hard is multiple hypotheses (or amazingly, exhausting all hypotheses). Your crash can be caused by errors on many different abstraction levels, so your debugging process has to be thought about on many levels. On one level, you have an illegal access via pointer. On another, you have a user whose information is incomplete.

Once you find a bug it's often hard to trace back exactly what the original state (including your state of mind) was, because you'll have taken the thing apart in various ways, added logging, looked at the call stack, memory, etc. And once you know the issue you shave down the explanation so that all those tedious steps that didn't lead to the answer seem to vanish.

One thing that got me thinking was this idea that people are expected to fail. To me, such a process is incredibly wasteful, and itself a failure. Are engineering students immune to ordinary psychology? If you tell people half of them will give up, you'll lose a lot of them, even ones who could pass.

You can make a course difficult, but don't tell people they will fail. I was never confronted with such statements, yet after my first year about 10% of the engineers had been booted due to failing exams.

His other point seems to be that courses are difficult because they aren't taught to people with the prerequisites. That should never be the case. Where I went the prereqs were a very standard set of math courses, and you could access most non-math courses knowing just those.

  as long as you don't copy paste code

The way it works in law school is that students (at least the social ones) break up into study groups early on. They may or may not be friends outside the study group. The key is that the study groups span multiple classes, and sometimes last the entire three years. In other words, it's an iterated game that discourages cheating from the outset. Being ostracized from a group is a huge liability, especially if you're a cheater.

This strategy doesn't work as well in undergraduate programs. There's too much churn and variability (in the student population, in their intelligence, in the number of subject classes, in the number of professors teaching the same subject), which means it's easier for cheaters to come and go without having to suffer repercussions.

I'm not a collaborator. To learn (and retain) I need to work through things alone, especially on difficult problems. Talking with other people about a problem is usually a distraction, and almost guarantees I won't internalize and retain the material. The above descriptions of group dynamics is my outsider's perspective.

Its absence in any course is conspicuous.

But at the same time more than half of the professional web developers I know don't really use a debugger. Equally problematic.