That was when the true horror of programming struck me. Years later, when I came across the famous quote by Wilkes that "I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs." I instantly knew it for truth.

This realization caused one of my big life mistakes, I think. It struck me in high school, and so I foolishly switched my focus from computer science to physics (I think, there might have been a subject or two in between) because I disliked debugging. Later, I realized that programming was both powerful and inescapable, and so I'd have to get over how much debugging sucked, which by then I had the emotional maturity to do (and I suspect I could have done back then, if I had also had the realization that much of my intellectual output would be programming in basically any field).