Error between the Keyboard & Brain

My main task this week was to expand the calibration script with a simple task I’d done
before with a slight twist. First create a file using touch to hold a log in the directory for
a certain test, set up an if case because the user might want the log in a separate directory
and ask the user which they want to use. We’d rerun a few tests and then finally start
looking at some data. I had a few other tasks on top of this, but obviously I did not get
to those because programming can be deceptive. Once you feel grounded in another
language it can lead to a blind trust in the code you write. Hubris edging you on the
whole time, Pssh we’ve been using unix for two years now. We’ve used touch a thousand
times on the command line. So easy.

Instantly then when things go wrong we must distrust the new language! Dude no way
did I mess up my unix commands. It’s all perl’s fault! I’ve spend hours on the script, read
online tutorials finding no one else had problems doing this, reread the man page on
touch. It’s all stupid perl!

Except when perl isn’t at fault. And I realized this hours later. When my cutesy
workaround hack began turning into a contender for an obfuscated perl contest entry.
After shooting off an email to my professor that made me feel crummy. I obviously
sucked at coding for not solving this problem on my own. It’s so simple. Then the
response came and she asked if maybe the directory path wasn’t correct in my test inputs.
That reply almost made me ready to hide under my desk because that hinted at hours of
backing up mentally and rewriting the whole block of code to my original solution.

I would have loved to let myself get mad at that jerk of a user. All that time wasted! Bad
input was at fault! My code isn’t suppose to catch the user’s errors! But I was that bad
test user and I let those errors make me distrust the 80% working code. A little tweak to
get it 100% working was all it would take.

But really this stumble reminded me I’ve only been coding seriously for barely two
years. I’m still very much a toddler in terms of coding experience. This setback won’t
discourage me. Until this giant mess, I didn’t notice the huge improvements from my
first Programming I class to now. The important thing I need to keep reminding myself
is I need to keep writing consistently correct code over the long haul. That’s all that
is required. Not rushing myself because I should be handling more and writing harder
scripts. The code’s going to show that rushing by not working.