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Interactive debugging is a useful tool, but it can encourage lazy reasoning. People just write something and step through until they notice some change they don
by cookiecaper 10y ago
Interactive debugging is a useful tool, but it can encourage lazy reasoning. People just write something and step through until they notice some change they don't expect. That's fine and everything, but talking about "crutches" and tooling, it sounds like you may be a little biased toward big-IDE style development that makes the debugger the automatic answer v. some reasoning over the code and extra logging of potential trouble spots. There's nothing wrong with logging output v. stepping through in an interactive debugger per se.
- mattmanser 10y agoLogging is lazy reasoning. Stepping through is simply seeing what is happening with a bug you can replicate. Stepping through is the step in debugging after reading the code. Even after you've read the code and think you've spotted the problem, you should step through to 100% confirm you've understood the problem. It's simply confirming the bug and the solution, it's good science, it's good practice. It's empirical.