5 ms·
It's a view with which I am familiar. In general, I agree that a programmer must reason about code execution, and that a debugger does not replace this process.
by gcv 18y ago
It's a view with which I am familiar. In general, I agree that a programmer must reason about code execution, and that a debugger does not replace this process. However: with all due respect, a symbolic debugger is invaluable while trying to figure why inherited, legacy, spaghetti-ridden code which relies on pearls like parallel arrays in multiple different data structures being in sync crashes at 3 o'clock in the morning.
- stcredzero 18y agoWhen I used to hang out in the workstation room at grad school, around midnight, I'd see guys feverishly trying to complete their beginning programming assignments. Invariably, some poor schmo was stuck trying to figure out where they went wrong with a doubly linked list implementation in C. They'd sit transfixed, staring at their code concocting all sorts of wild theories. I'd go up to them and tell them they should really try GDB. They'd always declare that they didn't have the time to learn it. Then at about 3:00 in the morning, they'd be desperate enough to try it. Most of the time, we'd find their bug within a few minutes.