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I have a friend who is the best programmer I know who says he used time spent in the debugger as a red flag that someone is bad at programming. He writes lots
by jhayward 7y ago
I have a friend who is the best programmer I know who says he used time spent in the debugger as a red flag that someone is bad at programming.
He writes lots of validation/logging features in his code. Not a whole lot of unit tests, per se, that I've seen.
- sjf 7y agoI believe the total opposite is true. If I can use a debugger you can bet I am going to prefer that over log statements. In the debugger I can see the value of any variable on the entire stack and how they change over time. If I want to log that I would have to add _many_ log statements, trawl through the output and then go back and remove them afterwards.
- alexhutcheson 7y agoEh, in my experience "time spent in the debugger" correlates positively with how good someone is at programming, because the weakest programmers I have worked with have no idea how to drive a debugger and never use one. In single-threaded environments (like most unit tests) I think a debugger is an enormous productivity enhancer. I think "time spent quickly making minor changes, re-compiling, and re-running the code" is a better indicator of weak debugging skills, but that still doesn't mean they are a "bad programmer". Often all they need is someone with stronger debugging skills to walk through an example debugging session with them, and teach them what techniques and tools they would use to approach the problem.