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I think JavaScript debuggers in browsers are AMAZING, it is fantastic to have such powerful programming tools on almost every computer! Just like BASIC in DOS c

I think JavaScript debuggers in browsers are AMAZING, it is fantastic to have such powerful programming tools on almost every computer! Just like BASIC in DOS computers and similar computers from that era, this is a programming language available by default almost everywhere. And the debugger tools are powerful too with inspecting and changing variables, ... But what did the author expect, when using a programming language that is not JavaScript, that the JS debugger would show code in that language instead? Maybe the framework needs to compile to JS that looks closer to the code you typed then (or else have its own debugger for its language). That's not the JS debugger's fault but the framework. Disclaimer: I didn't read past the part where it showed React code and then showed that the debugger stops in different looking Javascript code instead

alkonaut 8y ago
Par for the course for any language and development environment is interactive debugger in the code you are writing. As the author I don’t care much about how many translation steps there are from “my” syntax to machine code, all I care about is that I can debug my own code and watch my own variables. The grandparents point is (I guess) that if choosing a reasonable language (such as TS) instead forces you to give up another must-have (e.g interactive debugging) then something is wrong with the tooling. I read others that claim they have working ts debugging so it’s certainly possible, but I’ll add one more par-for-the-course bullet point: it should work out of the box.
- Aardwolf 8y ago
  Well so it's the title of the article that ticks me off, "JavaScript debuggers are broken" Isn't instead the language the author is using (JSX?) that's broken by not providing a debugger for itself or compiling to an easier to debug form?

alkonaut 8y ago

Par for the course for any language and development environment is interactive debugger in the code you are writing. As the author I don’t care much about how many translation steps there are from “my” syntax to machine code, all I care about is that I can debug my own code and watch my own variables. The grandparents point is (I guess) that if choosing a reasonable language (such as TS) instead forces you to give up another must-have (e.g interactive debugging) then something is wrong with the tooling. I read others that claim they have working ts debugging so it’s certainly possible, but I’ll add one more par-for-the-course bullet point: it should work out of the box.

Aardwolf 8y ago
Well so it's the title of the article that ticks me off, "JavaScript debuggers are broken" Isn't instead the language the author is using (JSX?) that's broken by not providing a debugger for itself or compiling to an easier to debug form?