4 ms·

I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I very rarely use debuggers. Print statements have always worked for me even in large codebases. What am I missing here?

by tjpnz 6y ago

zwieback 6y ago
Maybe you're not missing anything - if you're productive with print debugging and have used a debugger but found that it doesn't help that much I wouldn't worry about it. I'm the opposite - immediately run in the debugger to probe around how to use this or that API or verify that the code is really doing what I think. I also find that stepping through my code early on often gives me insight in how to implement something more efficiently.
hansvm 6y ago
I'm just one data point, but I also rarely use debuggers and often work with a colleague who rarely uses print statements. There are qualitative differences in the code we're usually modifying though; in particular, he's often editing code where the control flow is hard to reason about (inheritance towers, pages of conditionals, etc) and is fairly slow to build and run. In that environment I might even reach for a debugger myself -- e.g., even if you already isolated the bug to a particular portion of the code and just wanted to know which method was being dispatched you would need a ton of print statements, or at least a lot of back-and-forths editing the code and figuring out where you ended up (because of the high branch complexity which could send you far from where you started), and those restarts would be fairly slow in and of themselves. Contrast that with a debugger where you can quickly step forward and find out exactly where you end up. IMO, print statements are easier/faster to use than debuggers, so I reach for those first unless there's some feature a debugger has that I think will make my life easier overall.

4 ms·

I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I very rarely use debuggers. Print statements have always worked for me even in large codebases. What am I missing here?

by tjpnz 6y ago

I'm somewhat embarrassed to say that I very rarely use debuggers. Print statements have always worked for me even in large codebases. What am I missing here?

zwieback 6y ago
Maybe you're not missing anything - if you're productive with print debugging and have used a debugger but found that it doesn't help that much I wouldn't worry about it. I'm the opposite - immediately run in the debugger to probe around how to use this or that API or verify that the code is really doing what I think. I also find that stepping through my code early on often gives me insight in how to implement something more efficiently.
hansvm 6y ago
I'm just one data point, but I also rarely use debuggers and often work with a colleague who rarely uses print statements. There are qualitative differences in the code we're usually modifying though; in particular, he's often editing code where the control flow is hard to reason about (inheritance towers, pages of conditionals, etc) and is fairly slow to build and run. In that environment I might even reach for a debugger myself -- e.g., even if you already isolated the bug to a particular portion of the code and just wanted to know which method was being dispatched you would need a ton of print statements, or at least a lot of back-and-forths editing the code and figuring out where you ended up (because of the high branch complexity which could send you far from where you started), and those restarts would be fairly slow in and of themselves. Contrast that with a debugger where you can quickly step forward and find out exactly where you end up. IMO, print statements are easier/faster to use than debuggers, so I reach for those first unless there's some feature a debugger has that I think will make my life easier overall.