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Debuggers help me when I'm stuck with some kind of bugs, like when I need to find out where a certain variable is set. But some tasks are easier to debug with p
by rmetzler 10y ago
Debuggers help me when I'm stuck with some kind of bugs, like when I need to find out where a certain variable is set. But some tasks are easier to debug with print statements. And often I wish debuggers could go back to the previous statement and so I wouldn't need to add another breakpoint in front and run the program again.
- ecopoesis 10y agoYou're just used to using poor tools. Visual Studio has reverse step since 2010, GDB since 2009. I can't think of a single task that's easier with print statements vs a basic breakpoint debugger. And if you include fancier debugger features like reverse step, code injection and moving the instruction pointer, debuggers win by an order of magnitude. People generally ascribe the rise of Web 2.0 to AJAX, and while that's part of it, what really made Web 2.0 possible was Firebug delivering a useable debugger for Javascript, so complex AJAX apps could actually be created.
- ecopoesis 10y agoSomehow I lost my original point in the comment above, which was that I believe debuggers are so important, it's literally the first feature I got working in my toy programming language. Being able to see how terribly I've screwed things up in CLion makes fixing my idiocy much easier.