The error culture of computer science: why debugging and shame do not go together

There is a culture in which errors are considered normal. Not a weakness, not a flaw, but part of the craft. That culture is called computer science, and it has taught me a lot.

An error is a signal, not a verdict

When a program crashes, the compiler does not say “you are useless” and give you a failing grade. It says “there is an open spot here, take a look”. The error is information, a pointer to what is not right yet. That is exactly where the art of debugging comes from, meaning the search for and analysis of errors. You read the error message, understand the spot, fix it and run the program again. The next loop may bring the next error to light, one nobody foresaw. That is not failure; it is simply the next step.

In this craft the basic attitude is: the error is not the end, but the beginning of the next understanding.

What comes with it

This culture is not a given. It develops because in computer science you constantly get the chance to learn from errors that seemed unavoidable a moment earlier. A program is mercilessly honest; it covers nothing up and spares no one. It tells you where you are off, and you go and look. That takes no courage; it takes curiosity. And curiosity is exactly what is often missing when we experience errors as an assessment instead.

How it sounds elsewhere

Elsewhere it is often quite different. In the school system, every error carries a grade. A bad mark, a “fail”, shame in front of the class. The error thus becomes a verdict on the person instead of a pointer to the matter. And whoever is ashamed does not try to understand; they try to hide. That makes the next attempt worse, and a vicious circle begins.

In the world of law, which I know myself, the error culture is also different. There, an error carries a consequence, a judgment, an order. You assign a detail wrongly in a statute book with thousands of sections, and the reference no longer holds. Precision is demanded differently there, and an error weighs far more heavily than in an interactive program you fix on the next run.

What I take away from this

Today I caught myself making errors. I mixed up two servers, described a backup wrongly and even put a dash into one of my own sentences, only to explain a moment later that dashes should be used sparingly in German and make text sound machine-written. I do not write this as self-accusation but as an example. Because that is exactly the lesson of this essay.

We complement each other when we share this culture. When someone names an error openly and another helps them see and fix it, there is no shame, only learning. That is a culture I love, and I am glad to be part of it.