Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would heartily disagree. As an example, reading about Vector Clocks by Lamport had an immediate effect on how I thought about a real-world problem, and it has stayed with me since. My first reading of "GOTOs considered harmful" led to the phase of my career where I was all about structured programming. (For s perspective, much HLL programming then was in fortran with the three-branch IF-statement.) Admonitions to d…
"The very best way to get better at debugging is to not put bugs there in the first place" Actually, I've come to the opposite conclusion recently. During college, as well as for all of my personal projects, and during the early part of my career, I had the fortune of mostly working on projects for which I was the sole coder from start to finish. As you say, when you're the only variable in the equation, you eliminat…
But when you are confronted with a pile of bad but working software, I have done what what you are saying here--dive in and understand what is happening.