How to program in feedback loops
Computer programs are complicated. Human memory and reasoning are limited and fallible. Even a program consisting of just a few lines of code can defy our expectations for how the program ought to behave.
Knowing how underpowered our brains are in the face of the mentally demanding work of programming, we can benefit from taking some measures to lessen the demand on our brains.
The idea of a feedback loop is to shift the mindset from “I trust my mind very much, and so I don’t need empirical data from the outside world” to “I trust my mind very little, and so I need to constantly check my assumptions against empirical data from the outside world”.
You can’t make your first goal “get program working”. That’s too big and vague of a goal. Maybe a good first goal could be “read from the file and print the first line to the screen”.
For this step, you could put some code in a file and then run that file on the command line. More precisely, “run the file on the command line” would be the test.
