Bug complexity and high level languages

I was reading Bob Congdon's recent post on James Tauber's Inverse Law of Bug Complexity:


"The harder a bug is to track down, the simpler the fix tends to be."


I don't agree this is a law at all. Mr. Tauber doesn't even seem too sure. The word 'tends' leaves too much wiggle room for a law. But the observation is not without merit. However, I'd say this is a rule of perception not reality. Most bugs are easy to fix once you know what the problem is. Bugs that are super hard to find just seem easier in relation to the task of finding them.


What really got me thinking about this however was the feeling that I haven't really had to chase a super hard bug since I started working in Java. Sure I've been confused by some class loading issues and hit a few JVM problems that were a pain but these pale in comparison to the stray pointer issues in C you would encounter, especially before protected memory and NuMega's Soft-Ice came on the scene.

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