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> Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved? Doesn't the Facebook editor / autocompleter do that? I guess it's not ava

by munin 8y ago

> Why doesn't autocomplete help me based on the adjacent problems others have solved? Doesn't the Facebook editor / autocompleter do that? I guess it's not available to anyone outside Facebook? > Why can't I connect my editor to a running program and hover over values to see what they last were? Why isn't time-traveling debugging widely deployed? Why can't I debug a function without restarting my program? print debugging is extremely versatile and the market has spoken that, apparently, nothing else has the same expressive power to overhead trade-off. I have a few theories: tool usability sucks (looking at you gdb), debugging and writing code are two different disciplines so if you can stay in the same modality (writing code) to do debugging it's one less thing that changes from under you, print debugging is versatile and can apply to everything from embedded to mobile to cloud to HPC. print debugging gets a lot of scorn but (if you want an appeal to authority) if you read "Coders at Work" no "famous" programmers use debuggers, they all use(d) print debugging.

melling 8y ago
All 15 of them? The market has spoken, programmers want free stuff, and they’re happy doing it the old fashioned way. Except for those who aren’t content: [Insert videos from Bret Victor here] https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 Lighttable is another attempt that comes to mind: http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/ http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/
- munin 8y ago
  From my direct, personal, experience, it goes something like this: "Don't you want better tools?" I'll ask "Of course!" the programmer replies (note sometimes this is a conversation with myself) "but I don't want to pay anything for it" they caveat. "That's no problem," I reply, "as long as it will make your life better." "Well, that sounds good, but I also don't want to have to learn anything new." "That..." "Also, it has to just work from day one, if it doesn't quite work as soon as I touch it, I'll swear off it forever and go talk badly about it on twitter and hacker news." "Ah..." "Also, it has to work with every use case I can think of. Multi-threaded, GUI, deployed to HPC clusters running RHEL6 and also Docker containers running CoreOS, and it should be able to help me be productive in either JavaScript or s390 assembler. Also it should take no time to set up, and start giving me answers straightaway." "Hm..." "You know what, the methods I already have already satisfy all of these requirements and as a bonus, I don't have to learn anything new in order to use them. I spend enough time learning new frameworks to write software, why would I spend more time learning frameworks to debug software?" "Because you spend more time debugging software than writing software?" "Honestly the process of debugging, and the process of writing, have become so intertwined in my thinking, that distinction between them seems arbitrary and pointless." "Thanks for your time."

by munin 8y ago

melling 8y ago

All 15 of them? The market has spoken, programmers want free stuff, and they’re happy doing it the old fashioned way. Except for those who aren’t content: [Insert videos from Bret Victor here] https://vimeo.com/36579366 https://vimeo.com/36579366 Lighttable is another attempt that comes to mind: http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/ http://www.chris-granger.com/lighttable/

munin 8y ago
From my direct, personal, experience, it goes something like this: "Don't you want better tools?" I'll ask "Of course!" the programmer replies (note sometimes this is a conversation with myself) "but I don't want to pay anything for it" they caveat. "That's no problem," I reply, "as long as it will make your life better." "Well, that sounds good, but I also don't want to have to learn anything new." "That..." "Also, it has to just work from day one, if it doesn't quite work as soon as I touch it, I'll swear off it forever and go talk badly about it on twitter and hacker news." "Ah..." "Also, it has to work with every use case I can think of. Multi-threaded, GUI, deployed to HPC clusters running RHEL6 and also Docker containers running CoreOS, and it should be able to help me be productive in either JavaScript or s390 assembler. Also it should take no time to set up, and start giving me answers straightaway." "Hm..." "You know what, the methods I already have already satisfy all of these requirements and as a bonus, I don't have to learn anything new in order to use them. I spend enough time learning new frameworks to write software, why would I spend more time learning frameworks to debug software?" "Because you spend more time debugging software than writing software?" "Honestly the process of debugging, and the process of writing, have become so intertwined in my thinking, that distinction between them seems arbitrary and pointless." "Thanks for your time."