The importance of visualization

1st off. Your mom's a whore.

2nd off, Debugging is a really shitty process. It's inherit to what we do of programmers. We, as flawed organisim, generate flawed logic and processes that rear their heads into your code, causing us nothing but premature balding, and grief.

As thinking creatures, we construct mental models in our mind, which we visualize as a series of logical steps and outcomes.

This is why visualization is so important. Ensuring that you're generating proper information from your systems to actually create a visual representation of what's occcuring can help millions of steps faster than just running the algorithm.

Infact, imagine NOT having a debugger. Image not having even a visualization of basic steps for your code paths. How hard would it be to debug anything in your code?

Now, there's not 100% definition about how much visualization you need, or when you should spend time implimenting it. IE you should spend the first 70% of your time, putting an algorithm together, and only until you need to start profiling, or a nasty bug comes up, do you need to visualize everything. BUT the main point here, is that stopping a debugging process to put in tools to help w/ the debugging process, is actually pretty valuable. Mainly because the same tools that you put in for the process can help you to do profiling characteristics.

So, make sure that next time you find yourself going "what the hell is this thing doing?" answer with " I don't know, let me look."

~Main