A tale of yak shaving

[Steven D'Aprano]

This is not exactly fresh (it was written back in March), but it's the first
time I saw it and I thought I'd share. Barry Warsaw, one of the lead Python
developers, describes one of his most ... interesting ... debugging
experiences.

http://www.wefearchange.org/2011/03/charming-snakes-and-shaving-yaks.html

Everyone who reported the problem said the TypeError was getting thrown on
the for-statement line. The exception message indicated that Python was
getting some object that it was trying to convert to an integer, but was
failing. How could you possible get that exception when either making a
copy of a list or iterating over that copy? Was the list corrupted? Was it
not actually a list but some list-like object that was somehow returning
non-integers for its min and max indexes?
[end quote]

 

[Seebs]

This is not exactly fresh (it was written back in March), but it's the first
time I saw it and I thought I'd share. Barry Warsaw, one of the lead Python
developers, describes one of his most ... interesting ... debugging
experiences.

That is a truly excellent debugging story.

I also like the term "yak shaving", and I suspect I'll be using that for
future such endeavors. Of which there are a fair number in my line of work.

-s