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Thanks for your take. What do you think of John Carmack's[1] suggestion that using a debugger is the best way to program? I am by no means comparing myself to

• wruza 4y ago
  I think that Carmack is biased towards game development, which is different from request-response or click-action. Extensive game logs would scroll faster than framerate, rendering themselves useless (pun not intended), so stop the world and explore it is. If I had to develop a system with hundreds of parameters changing with time, depending on random() or seconds of continuous input events, then of course I’d use conditional breakpoints and live watches instead of grepping gigabytes of unstable state reports. But also, games have huds, special rendering modes (wireframe, coords, paths prediction, visibility areas to name a few), consoles, so in a sense they have some debug output that either runs at the frame rate or is just text. That said, many developers find debuggers superior to logs in any situation, and if you do so, then use it. My advice is not universal. The key point is to explore development “modes” and choose what’s suits best the “write code faster” goal in your own domain.