An old timer once told me about how he would read his printouts, make new punch cards, send them over to the main office, someone would put the new cards into the system the next morning, and then read the printouts on the day after that to see if his code worked or not.
This. Except worse, during busy days you had to stand on line for an hour or more for a turn on the machines. I believe the skill of debugging by mentally stepping through a program's execution came from such long run times, a useful skill many younger programmers lack.
Yep I really hate the characterisation that tried to imply people are weaker or worse because they lack a contextually relevant skill.
I spent about 6 months teaching myself how to tie a set of useful knots, and the reality is by now I can't do most of them anymore because day to day it turns out I just never need to tie a Midshipmen's knot (it's super useful when the siruation arises..which is rarely for an IT worker).
The computer can single-step through the program far more accurately than you can. You can inspect the full state of the CPU and memory at any moment of execution. The debugger can tell you the real, exact value of a variable at runtime.
There is simply no reason to try doing this in your head. You're worse at it than the debugger is. And I say this as someone who does have the skill. It's just not necessary.
I haven't talked to anyone writing C++ code on a HPC cluster that I'm working on in a long, long time. And that's in industrial/chemical/automotive fields.
Back when people would try to winnuke others on IRC, the Linux guys would know who sent them the packet and call them out in the channel (and then usually ban them)
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