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I think we're mostly arguing about how useful the various approaches are. At least for me print debugging is a measure of last resort unless I want to extract s

I think we're mostly arguing about how useful the various approaches are. At least for me print debugging is a measure of last resort unless I want to extract some historical data out and I know it won't influence the timing of the issue I'm trying to chase down. With print debugging your inserting the whole build + deploy + repro setup loop into your debugging, if that's a long time(say 20 minutes in one job I had with production hardware) you're in for a world of pain. I find that just about any other tool usually is an order of magnitude more efficient. Also even the "step debugger" tools do the same thing you'd do with a print. LLVM for instance uses the IR JIT API to generate watch/eval values: https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ORCv2.html#use-cases https://releases.llvm.org/9.0.0/docs/ORCv2.html#use-cases IMO you should relentlessly optimize your iteration times, that's the inner loop of development speed and print debugging fares pretty poorly in that area for all the reasons above.

zamfi 5y ago
> I think we're mostly arguing about how useful the various approaches are. Ah, that's fair. > At least for me print debugging is a measure of last resort Right, and I think this depends on the domain. For lots of mature environments, this makes sense -- there's been years for tooling to catch up to the kinds of bugs people run into, possibly corporate money being put into developing debugging tools, etc. > IMO you should relentlessly optimize your iteration times, that's the inner loop of development speed and[...] Agreed, though the effect on print debugging on iteration time is very environment-dependent. > [...]print debugging fares pretty poorly in that area for all the reasons above Adding console.log to a web app can be a trivial change (though of course reproducing app state is another issue) -- again very environment-dependent.

zamfi 5y ago

> I think we're mostly arguing about how useful the various approaches are. Ah, that's fair. > At least for me print debugging is a measure of last resort Right, and I think this depends on the domain. For lots of mature environments, this makes sense -- there's been years for tooling to catch up to the kinds of bugs people run into, possibly corporate money being put into developing debugging tools, etc. > IMO you should relentlessly optimize your iteration times, that's the inner loop of development speed and[...] Agreed, though the effect on print debugging on iteration time is very environment-dependent. > [...]print debugging fares pretty poorly in that area for all the reasons above Adding console.log to a web app can be a trivial change (though of course reproducing app state is another issue) -- again very environment-dependent.