> Now, if you are running into bugs that take you 4+ hours to resolve, you simply have not been programming long enough.
I'm sorry, but that statement is untrue; there is no generalization for the term "bug". They can be as simple as "your borders on this web page are misaligned" to a subtle memory leak that can only be reproduced on a small fraction of users' systems. Or maybe the bug is a fundamental design flaw that requires rethinking the entire project (oops).
Now how often do you run into these subtle memory leaks? How often do you run into fundamental design flaws? Once, twice a year?
If it happens so rarely, which for most developers I believe it does, why would you allow it to get you so jaded? Why would it be apart of your daily concerns or something you felt you needed to prepare for?
This depends heavily on the legacy of the codebase you are working with, I imagine. I'm thankful that I (nearly?) never run into serious design flaws, because the people that built this code before me did a really good job. I could easily imagine a worst-case scenario where the code you're maintaining was written by a stream of interns, implementing requirements written by committee, over the space of a dozen years. Fundamental design flaws might be so ingrained, and the codebase so large, that you could not easily refactor it into something nicer.
This is true, but if you are working on such a large code base, and you like the company you work for, you will be working on it for a long time. You will become familiar with the coding style (or lack of style) of the original programmers, and you will be able to recognize their mistakes quicker over time.
Rewriting it is always on option, maybe not the correct one, but it is an option. But probably better is to figure out how to rewrite it in pieces.
If you are working with a legacy coldfusion or php code base, god help you. But there are still ways to abstract the original code to allow you to implement a more gradual/iterative code rewrite strat.
I'm sorry, but that statement is untrue; there is no generalization for the term "bug". They can be as simple as "your borders on this web page are misaligned" to a subtle memory leak that can only be reproduced on a small fraction of users' systems. Or maybe the bug is a fundamental design flaw that requires rethinking the entire project (oops).