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Debugging with the Scientific Method - Stuart Halloway

ClojureTV · 25.2K views · 2015-11-17 · 49:09

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Overview

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

On Hacker News

HN recommends it as a talk that changed how people debug, worth rewatching periodically.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2015–2023

Topics

Testing, debugging & developer toolsFunctional programming
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debuggingscientific methodclojurehypothesis testingstuart halloway

What people said

seanc · 2022-09 · Strong recommendation

This talk, "Debugging with the Scientific Method" changed how I debug problems. I try to watch it once every year or two. tl;dr, when debugging people naturally form a hypothesis about what is going wrong and then set about gathering evidence to support or refute that hypothesis. When you do so unconciously you are very prone to biases of all sorts, most importantly confirmation bias. When you do so mindfully, and Write It All Down then you are much more likely to a) come up with an evidence gathering exercise which will usefully falsify your hypothesis, and b) respect the gathered evidence, reject the now false hypothesis, and move on to a new one. [VIDEO]

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simon_acca · 2023-05 · Recommendation

Stu Halloway (also a member of the Clojure core team) has a couple of great talks on using the scientific method in programming: [VIDEO] [LINK]

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grierson · 2018-09 · Recommendation

Stuart Halloway from the Clojure community has some great a talks using the REPL to debug. Links: Debugging with the Scientific Method - Stuart Halloway ( [VIDEO] ) REPL DEBUGGING: NO STACKTRACE REQUIRED ( [LINK] ) scope-capture ( [LINK] )

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Sources

Video by ClojureTV, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

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