Guido van Rossum

is that software is a very social activity.

A software developer is not a mad scientist who sits alone in his lab writing brilliant code.

Software is developed by teams of people.

Even the mad scientist sitting alone in his lab can type fast enough to produce enough code so that by the time he's done with his coding, he still remembers what the first few lines he wrote mean.

So even the mad scientist coding alone in his lab would be sort of wise to adopt conventions on how to format the instructions that he gives to the computer so that

The thing is, there is a difference between a cookbook recipe and a computer program.

The cookbook recipe, the author of the cookbook writes it once and then it's printed in 100,000 copies.

And then lots of people in their kitchens try to recreate that recipe, that particular pie or dish from the recipe.

And so they're the...

The goal of the cookbook author is to make it clear to the human reader of the recipe, the human amateur chef in most cases.

When you're writing a computer program, you have two audiences at once.

It needs to tell the computer what to do.

But it also is useful if that program is readable by other programmers.

Because computer software, unlike the typical recipe for a cherry pie, is so complex that you don't get all of it right at once.

You end up with the activity of debugging.

And you end up with the activity of... So debugging is...

Trying to figure out why your code doesn't run the way you thought it should run.

It could be anything.

Yeah.

It could be anything from a typo to a wrong choice of algorithm to building something that does what you tell it to do, but that's not useful.