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Yes, half the blame is on the languages I wish there was a 'here be dragons' statement that you could put and it would run a function or a snippet on a special

Yes, half the blame is on the languages I wish there was a 'here be dragons' statement that you could put and it would run a function or a snippet on a special debugging mode (without the need for a debugging tool). And then ask questions like "who set this to value X" or "just print the local vars here" etc I think the closest we have to this are the debugging environments that (for example) Flask gives you (maybe other frameworks)

johnchristopher 4y ago
That's basically how breakpoints work in python, right ?
- TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
  There's a stack frame and you can watch on variables to trigger the debugger when they change. But there's no operation tracing. I'm not aware of any language/system that automatically logs all operations with their context/value and boils that down to a useful display. Debuggers seem to all use the ancient machine code model where they replace an instruction with "And now launch the debugger to see what state the variables, memory, and registers are." It would be useful to have more print-like features that create a searchable list of all entries/exits/creators/destructors in sequence with associated parameters and values.
  - kaba0 4y ago
    There are even time traveling debuggers that can reverse code flow, so I’m sure something similar exists.