4 ms·

I can relate to the debugging part. Useless stack traces have been the reason I simply gave up on Clojure.

by VMG 16y ago

pmjordan 16y ago
I wouldn't call them useless, but I guess I'm used to C++, or worse, just a hex stack dump (yay, game consoles). Clojure mangles names somewhat to make them Java-compatible; you can easily do the reverse translation in your head. Still, this could be automated rather easily.
- VMG 16y ago
  As far as I remember clojure just spit out "This is not a function" or something like that, without any indication where the error occured. There is a trace macro but it doesn't provide complete traces without explicitly adding every function you want to trace, which becomes tricky very soon. Manual tracing with printf()s like in non-functional languages isn't built-in either. There are half-baked macros for this on blogs if you google hard enough, but that is not the kind of thing that leaves a solid impression of a language. Maybe I was just working in a non-clojuresque way.
  - nickik 16y ago
    I agree its a problem. I use the repl a lot and bild up the functions and debug with prints witch is ok because you can print anything (not like in VB). I know that they are working on it so I hope it will get better. For me, however, its not a reason to quit.
qbg 16y ago
I have been working on a fork of Clojure off-and-on that tries to improve the debugging experience (https://github.com/qbg/clojure https://github.com/qbg/clojure). How do you think the stack traces could be improved?
- VMG 16y ago
  Suppose you accidentally put an extra pair of braces deeply inside a function. The message you'll get is something like "could not cast to function" without any meaningful information where this happened.
- kumarshantanu 16y ago
  This is one example of how to remove uninteresting stack frames from Clojure stack traces. http://j.mp/h3xzdN http://j.mp/h3xzdN
  - gtani 16y ago
    http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-setup.html http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-setup.html http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-12-09.html#09:53 http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-12-09.html#09:53 http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Stacktraces http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Stacktraces http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/5b157939e828e11d# http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/5b1... http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-733 http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-733

I can relate to the debugging part. Useless stack traces have been the reason I simply gave up on Clojure.

by VMG 16y ago

I can relate to the debugging part. Useless stack traces have been the reason I simply gave up on Clojure.

I wouldn't call them useless, but I guess I'm used to C++, or worse, just a hex stack dump (yay, game consoles). Clojure mangles names somewhat to make them Java-compatible; you can easily do the reverse translation in your head. Still, this could be automated rather easily.

VMG 16y ago
As far as I remember clojure just spit out "This is not a function" or something like that, without any indication where the error occured. There is a trace macro but it doesn't provide complete traces without explicitly adding every function you want to trace, which becomes tricky very soon. Manual tracing with printf()s like in non-functional languages isn't built-in either. There are half-baked macros for this on blogs if you google hard enough, but that is not the kind of thing that leaves a solid impression of a language. Maybe I was just working in a non-clojuresque way.
- nickik 16y ago
  I agree its a problem. I use the repl a lot and bild up the functions and debug with prints witch is ok because you can print anything (not like in VB). I know that they are working on it so I hope it will get better. For me, however, its not a reason to quit.

qbg 16y ago

I have been working on a fork of Clojure off-and-on that tries to improve the debugging experience (https://github.com/qbg/clojure https://github.com/qbg/clojure). How do you think the stack traces could be improved?

VMG 16y ago
Suppose you accidentally put an extra pair of braces deeply inside a function. The message you'll get is something like "could not cast to function" without any meaningful information where this happened.
kumarshantanu 16y ago
This is one example of how to remove uninteresting stack frames from Clojure stack traces. http://j.mp/h3xzdN http://j.mp/h3xzdN
- gtani 16y ago
  http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-setup.html http://mmcgrana.github.com/2010/03/clojure-setup.html http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-12-09.html#09:53 http://clojure-log.n01se.net/date/2010-12-09.html#09:53 http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Stacktraces http://dev.clojure.org/display/design/Stacktraces http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/5b157939e828e11d# http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_frm/thread/5b1... http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-733 http://dev.clojure.org/jira/browse/CLJ-733