Failure

Have you ever noticed that when everything goes as planned, you actually learn less? Do not be afraid to fail. Think of it this way: there’s not much to learn when things work. When they fail however, you have a chance to understand where the boundaries are, providing us an opportunity to learn more when things go awry.



Edison quote mug by ~estranged-illusions on deviantART


Imagine: After creating a program and testing it against the known correct results, everything works. Congratulations! You just learned how to solve the problem. BUT! Consider this- When you test your program and something goes wrong, what do you do? Give up? Of course not! One of the best ways to study programming is through trial and error, and being wrong is an integral part of the learning process. When the program doesn't work as intended, we find the bugs and fix it. We test more. We think more. We learn more.

However, constant failure is another beast entirely. The saying goes: "Fool me once, shame on you, Fool me twice, shame on me". This is particularly true in programming, where a correct line of code will always produce the correct output and vice versa.

A professor in a prestigeous college once said that programming is a routinary job- eg. doing the same things over and over again. This true only when the programmer is NOT learning, and is constantly wrong, and thus have to repeat his job over and over again. A real programmer writes code only once, tests and tweaks for errors, learning what to do and what not to do along the way, and reuses old code extensively. Strive to be that kind of programmer.

Until next time, Sayonara~