Prof. Norm Matloff: Help in Programming Courses

My TA and I always want you to develop your programming and other skills as much as possible. Here are some guidelines to follow in order to ensure that if you have a difficult bug you can resolve it and improve your programming/debugging skills at the same time:

• The TA and I should be a last resort, not a first one. If you don't spend enough time thrashing through challenging situations, you will never become a good programmer. It truly is a case of "no pain, no gain." Come to us only after you have gone through this "thrashing about." We are happy to help you, but this first step is crucial.
• Similarly, make serious use of a debugging tool, applying the Principle of Confirmation: Step through the code line by line, checking values of variables that you "know" are valid -- and likely you will eventually hit one that is not valid after all. There is your clue as to at least the locaton of the bug.
• Do NOT just send a screenshot. In many/most cases, it is useless without context.
• Instead, run the Unix script command (on CSIF if you don't have a Unix machine), which records your entire session in a file; send us that file, not a screenshot. In that session, you should not only run the program but also show the context, e.g. by running pwd, printenv and so on.