3 ms·

Not a big name myself, but I'm always surprised that this surprises people. I mostly use print statements, simply because a) every environment has them, b) ther

Not a big name myself, but I'm always surprised that this surprises people. I mostly use print statements, simply because a) every environment has them, b) there is much less (none) fiddling involved to set them up, and c) because debugging is rarely needed anyway, assuming you are working on your own / your team's code (and that you are half good). I think the last time I have used a debugger was on what I think would be a definition of spaghetti code - not proud of it, but I did learn not to do that. :)

Tainnor 6y ago
This is interesting, I use the debugger a lot, in whatever language. I've debugged with CLI interfaces and I've used IDEs. I don't want to claim this is superior to printf debugging, or whatever other technique. I just like seeing the code executing, and debugging some weird error can sometimes be an almost relaxing activity, as you just step through the code one by one and try to keep track of what's happening without needing to think more than 2 or 3 steps ahead. That said, I'm also the guy who will happily put breakpoints into internal framework code (e.g. Spring Boot) so that I can understand why the framework doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Usually, I find the answer, although maybe in some cases it would have been more economical to use a workaround instead, but that would leave me dissatisfied...
- hamburglar 6y ago
  I rarely use the debugger in highly async systems (e.g. node) because it's just a mess, but in C/C++/Go/Java where there actually are good debuggers and you tend to have chunks (e.g. entire functions) of synchronous code, I find it very, very helpful to step line-by-line through most nontrivial code at least once for any major code path. A long time ago, I had a sort-of mentor who, whenever he looked at new code, asked the author "have you single-stepped through it yet?" so I did it to humor him, but the number of times I caught errors was eye-opening, so to this day I still like to do it.

Tainnor 6y ago

This is interesting, I use the debugger a lot, in whatever language. I've debugged with CLI interfaces and I've used IDEs. I don't want to claim this is superior to printf debugging, or whatever other technique. I just like seeing the code executing, and debugging some weird error can sometimes be an almost relaxing activity, as you just step through the code one by one and try to keep track of what's happening without needing to think more than 2 or 3 steps ahead. That said, I'm also the guy who will happily put breakpoints into internal framework code (e.g. Spring Boot) so that I can understand why the framework doesn't do what it's supposed to do. Usually, I find the answer, although maybe in some cases it would have been more economical to use a workaround instead, but that would leave me dissatisfied...

hamburglar 6y ago
I rarely use the debugger in highly async systems (e.g. node) because it's just a mess, but in C/C++/Go/Java where there actually are good debuggers and you tend to have chunks (e.g. entire functions) of synchronous code, I find it very, very helpful to step line-by-line through most nontrivial code at least once for any major code path. A long time ago, I had a sort-of mentor who, whenever he looked at new code, asked the author "have you single-stepped through it yet?" so I did it to humor him, but the number of times I caught errors was eye-opening, so to this day I still like to do it.