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I think it's fascinating to see how my friends at university (who previously had no programming experience) have started to "get" debugging and the benefits of
by filleokus 10y ago
I think it's fascinating to see how my friends at university (who previously had no programming experience) have started to "get" debugging and the benefits of using something like a step-debugger. It took several programming courses before they started to actually debug the code instead of just reading it and trying to figure out what happens. I mean, reading the code is also an integral part of debugging, but often times they said things like "fooBar _should_ be true, so we _should_ enter this conditional". Then it of course turned out that fooBar was in fact not true because of some logic bug or something they didn't even consider.
- wapz 10y agoThe problem I had at the university was that our code was so simple relative to large codebases that a debugger was generally not necessary for me. We learned how to use it and I found it to be a burden because I could find the bug "much quicker" either with 1-2 print statements or just by reading it. After working with much bigger problems I realized the importance of debuggers and really wished they were stressed even more than they were in my university days.
- hamstercat 10y agoI had the same experience at University. We didn't learn how to use a debugger and rather relied on logging data to see the flow of the program. That, plus the fact that our code was a big mess since we were just starting didn't make it easy to find the more obscure bugs. I was really impressed the first time my friend fired up Netbeans and showed me that how he could find the value of the variables at runtime, at any point in time of the execution. Today I find it unacceptable when I'm in a situation where I can't debug a program I'm working on, it just seems like a waste of time.