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Is there empirical evidence to support the idea that PHP developers do not use xdebug? If not, perhaps you can explain why you think this? I have largely stopp

Is there empirical evidence to support the idea that PHP developers do not use xdebug? If not, perhaps you can explain why you think this? I have largely stopped coding in PHP, but I did use xdebug when necessary. I have very little idea of other developers' workflows, but I am very skeptical of this claim.

smt88 8y ago
I consulted with ~12 teams of PHP (not WordPress) developers between 2004 and 2016. Some were in the US, some in Europe. Zero of them used xdebug until I forced them to.
- sethrin 8y ago
  Interesting. Which framework(s) were these teams using? How large were they? xdebug is not always the most straightforward thing to set up. I don't tend to bother with it unless I am doing a lot of PHP development (which fortunately has not been the case recently). I've also had less cause to use it since the introduction of the Psy shell. It's still something that I would consider an essential tool, and I do wonder at the circumstances which allowed these teams to be able to get by without it, but the experience could maybe be a bit smoother. I did not think that the ST2/ST3 or Atom integration was that great; the best experience I had was with NetBeans, but NetBeans is otherwise pretty clunky. Presumably your mileage varies somewhat.
  - smt88 8y ago
    Frameworks varied, but included Laravel, Symfony, and Cake. Some code bases were spaghetti. I agree that xdebug is hard to set up. I only had reproducible success with it after Vagrant became mainstream. Otherwise we had to share a dev server with all the team members in their own directories, and getting xdebug running on the dev server was a trial-and-error headache. Debugging is one of the reasons I can’t recommend PHP to anyone for any purpose anymore.
- conradfr 8y ago
  I've been a PHP developer for a long time at many companies and I've always been the only one using xDebug. People generally find setting it up confusing (which it can be). Also xDebug can't discriminate if you have multiple projects running in one fpm etc which can be irritating if your request hit many of them (ie calls that can't be mapped in your debugging session).

smt88 8y ago

I consulted with ~12 teams of PHP (not WordPress) developers between 2004 and 2016. Some were in the US, some in Europe. Zero of them used xdebug until I forced them to.

sethrin 8y ago
Interesting. Which framework(s) were these teams using? How large were they? xdebug is not always the most straightforward thing to set up. I don't tend to bother with it unless I am doing a lot of PHP development (which fortunately has not been the case recently). I've also had less cause to use it since the introduction of the Psy shell. It's still something that I would consider an essential tool, and I do wonder at the circumstances which allowed these teams to be able to get by without it, but the experience could maybe be a bit smoother. I did not think that the ST2/ST3 or Atom integration was that great; the best experience I had was with NetBeans, but NetBeans is otherwise pretty clunky. Presumably your mileage varies somewhat.
- smt88 8y ago
  Frameworks varied, but included Laravel, Symfony, and Cake. Some code bases were spaghetti. I agree that xdebug is hard to set up. I only had reproducible success with it after Vagrant became mainstream. Otherwise we had to share a dev server with all the team members in their own directories, and getting xdebug running on the dev server was a trial-and-error headache. Debugging is one of the reasons I can’t recommend PHP to anyone for any purpose anymore.
conradfr 8y ago
I've been a PHP developer for a long time at many companies and I've always been the only one using xDebug. People generally find setting it up confusing (which it can be). Also xDebug can't discriminate if you have multiple projects running in one fpm etc which can be irritating if your request hit many of them (ie calls that can't be mapped in your debugging session).