> participants solved mentally active programming tasks (coding) and monotonous ones (debugging)
Am I the only one that finds debugging not monotonous at all? Often the programming feels more monotonous. I'm not sure if that's because I feel like I'm learning something when I'm debuggging or that a bug is a puzzle to solve, I feel like a detective and a scientist figuring out things about my small part of the universe. In comparison programming feels like playing with sand in the desert. Where you can do everything but it's hard to decide what and where and ultimately whatever you build doesn't really feel impactful. It's still a desert and those are still just sandcastles.
I might have ADHD, I suffer from a lot of the same inconveniences at similar intensity that ADHD diagnosed adults suffer from.
Maybe it's "stupid parser error debugging", where a single missing comma in a csv, or a missing semi-colon in a long one-line shell script, causes a bizarre, misleading error message.
Something where your tools mislead you because the input broke all the assumptions that were made.
In my experience I then have to resort some quick slice-and-dice work in a text editor to bisect the problem, and I'll eventually find it, but it is tedious and not fun. And your reward is usually learning "the input was wrong", not "the code is wrong".
Am I the only one that finds debugging not monotonous at all? Often the programming feels more monotonous. I'm not sure if that's because I feel like I'm learning something when I'm debuggging or that a bug is a puzzle to solve, I feel like a detective and a scientist figuring out things about my small part of the universe. In comparison programming feels like playing with sand in the desert. Where you can do everything but it's hard to decide what and where and ultimately whatever you build doesn't really feel impactful. It's still a desert and those are still just sandcastles.
I might have ADHD, I suffer from a lot of the same inconveniences at similar intensity that ADHD diagnosed adults suffer from.