106 Miles to Chicago

Coder CSI

Greg Wilson tells of his team's experience trying to track down a bug and then getting various responses from the Python mailing list.

There have been over a dozen messages on the Python developers' list since then about how to fix this. The most interesting part for me hasn't been the proposals themselves, but rather the fact that the first thing Walter and Martin did was write little test programs and profile them to find out how fast things would actually run. To put it another way, good programmers like Walter and Martin automatically apply the scientific method to problems---they design and run experiments, collect data, and then formulate a hypothesis (a.k.a. a bug fix). It's cool to be able to watch this in action, and even cooler to have code that runs fast enough to be called interactive.