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This is excessively common. Somehow modern debugging is essentially as nuanced as "shit broke". Debugging was far better 20+ years ago under C++ in win32 then i

This is excessively common. Somehow modern debugging is essentially as nuanced as "shit broke". Debugging was far better 20+ years ago under C++ in win32 then it is today - there was working code navigation as well. I don't know how we have fallen so far back in the tooling.

ehnto 8y ago
PHP debugging is fine. Conditional breakpoints, walking up the stack trace, interactive and in-place code execution at run-time meaning I can run code or change variables and it applies to the current execution. It's great. Javascript is a nightmare to debug, but it's probably just as much to do with architecture than debugging tools. Of course it's hard to debug a dozen tiny libraries written in ES6, transpiled down to ES5, packed into a module loader and flung around asyncronously. JS debugging is fine in native, dependency free code I write. My sense is that debugging was something a lot of newer developers found out about later in their education and as such they never noticed debuggability and tooling wasn't up to par with older tooling.
- kristopolous 8y ago
  Python and perl are good too. I've heard marvelous things about emacs consistent uniform debugging interface that takes care of the magic behind the scenes. In so much as my friend just gets debugging as a built-in feature when he transits around languages without any knowledge of the underlying invocation and implementation nuances. He has the same keystrokes and interface in all the common languages. It sounds magnificent. One day I hope to actually take the time to learn it.
  - etatoby 8y ago
    I found it extremely hard to learn Emacs and memorize all the keystrokes. They made no sense. After some time I gave up. Learning Vim was a breeze compared to it.
spockz 8y ago
Debugging Java/Scala works really nice in IntelliJ. It also has support for asynchronous stack traces which means to say that stack traces are carried over asynchronous boundaries. It even works for callbacks. Edit: Having said this, I still rely more on creating test cases to capture what I think should happen instead of stepping through the code in a white box way.
tobyhinloopen 8y ago
I'm also writing a C app as a hobby. Somehow LLDB is an excellent debugger in my hobby app. Same with Swift (iOS) development.

ehnto 8y ago

PHP debugging is fine. Conditional breakpoints, walking up the stack trace, interactive and in-place code execution at run-time meaning I can run code or change variables and it applies to the current execution. It's great. Javascript is a nightmare to debug, but it's probably just as much to do with architecture than debugging tools. Of course it's hard to debug a dozen tiny libraries written in ES6, transpiled down to ES5, packed into a module loader and flung around asyncronously. JS debugging is fine in native, dependency free code I write. My sense is that debugging was something a lot of newer developers found out about later in their education and as such they never noticed debuggability and tooling wasn't up to par with older tooling.

kristopolous 8y ago
Python and perl are good too. I've heard marvelous things about emacs consistent uniform debugging interface that takes care of the magic behind the scenes. In so much as my friend just gets debugging as a built-in feature when he transits around languages without any knowledge of the underlying invocation and implementation nuances. He has the same keystrokes and interface in all the common languages. It sounds magnificent. One day I hope to actually take the time to learn it.
- etatoby 8y ago
  I found it extremely hard to learn Emacs and memorize all the keystrokes. They made no sense. After some time I gave up. Learning Vim was a breeze compared to it.

spockz 8y ago

Debugging Java/Scala works really nice in IntelliJ. It also has support for asynchronous stack traces which means to say that stack traces are carried over asynchronous boundaries. It even works for callbacks. Edit: Having said this, I still rely more on creating test cases to capture what I think should happen instead of stepping through the code in a white box way.

tobyhinloopen 8y ago

I'm also writing a C app as a hobby. Somehow LLDB is an excellent debugger in my hobby app. Same with Swift (iOS) development.