4 ms·

It’s still true. A debugger is still unnecessary for daily debugging.

• rsynnott 8y ago
  Unnecessary, maybe, but it's nice to have. I use IntelliJ's most days. If I just had something along the lines of gdb, I'd use it a lot less frequently; convenience and features have absolutely made debuggers a lot more attractive over the last few decades.
• josteink 8y ago
  > A debugger is still unnecessary for daily debugging. I think this serves nice as a historical record of how the state of the art was 40 years ago. Today, we have IDEs with integrated debuggers (not to mention Emacs and other editors usually integrate decently with gdb, lldb, pdb, etc. Using a debugger doesn't have to mean leaving your code and starting a different tool and different flow. If you'd ask any of my colleagues what they'd do if there was a new policy saying use of debuggers were no longer permitted on a daily basis, the answer would more likely than not include the word "riot". In a huge, complex code-base created by a diverse team of varied skill and competences, you can't assume all code is good or self-explanatory. When you get confused about what happens where and why, the debugger is probably going to be your best friend.
  • drb91 8y ago
    > If you'd ask any of my colleagues what they'd do if there was a new policy saying use of debuggers were no longer permitted on a daily basis, the answer would more likely than not include the word "riot". I’d imagine you’d have the same effect if you mandated the use of debuggers. And hey, I’m not arguing against their use, just saying they aren’t needed for most debugging. I would bet the vast majority of bugs in managed languages have bugs that are easily discernable if you have decent type/assertion boundaries. Needing to use a debugger is certainly a smell about your code.