Comment by yakshaving_jgt
Comment by yakshaving_jgt 5 days ago
I’m not sure it implies buying from elsewhere. I understood it to mean make a new one, rather than try to repair the broken one.
Comment by yakshaving_jgt 5 days ago
I’m not sure it implies buying from elsewhere. I understood it to mean make a new one, rather than try to repair the broken one.
Let me reformulate then.
Take the wikipedia article on debugging[1]. The first sentence identifies what debugging is: "In engineering, debugging is the process of finding the root cause, workarounds and possible fixes for bugs." I'd say this is implicitly about taking broken code and finding the error in it.
The second paragraph is clearer on this point:
> For software, debugging tactics can involve interactive debugging, control flow analysis, log file analysis, monitoring at the application or system level, memory dumps, and profiling. Many programming languages and software development tools also offer programs to aid in debugging, known as debuggers.
All of the debugging tactics listed are about working with an existing broken piece of code.
Further sections on debugging tools, debugging process ("debugging process normally begins with identifying the steps to reproduce the problem"), and techniques are also about working with broken code.
Completely rewriting the code is certainly a way to resume progress on a software project, but as the practice of debugging is imagined, rewriting is not debugging.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debugging