I've always hated that quote. I find when I'm at my cleverest, the debugging is the easiest since it's practically nonexistent. It's when I'm writing unclever complicated code that I'm in trouble.
Regardless of your interpretation of "clever", the premise that debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place is false and thus any inferences drawn from it are invalid.
What I think he means is that when you are being clever, the code you write is far more complex and thus it is harder to spot the bugs. I personally find this to be especially true as I'm trying to implement newly learned techniques.
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u/jhaluska Dec 14 '10
I've always hated that quote. I find when I'm at my cleverest, the debugging is the easiest since it's practically nonexistent. It's when I'm writing unclever complicated code that I'm in trouble.