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Taking personal pride in not using a debugger is a bad idea. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, and if your picking it up makes you feel dirty, you're o
by wissler 14y ago
Taking personal pride in not using a debugger is a bad idea. Sometimes it's the right tool for the job, and if your picking it up makes you feel dirty, you're only handicapping yourself.
- wpietri 14y agoBut sometimes it isn't the right tool for the job. In particular, it enables you to deal with a confusing, poorly factored code base. The right tools there are the ones that help you clean the mess up, rather than making the mess more tolerable.
- wissler 14y agoIf you have a rational argument that proves that debuggers are only useful on poorly designed code then I would certainly be interested in hearing it. It is true that the worse the code the more frequently you need to debug, but that's a quite different proposition.
- wpietri 14y agoI'm not saying they're only useful there. But we both agree that they're very helpful in understanding a bad codebase. That's because they make bad code easier to handle. Which for some people removes the incentive to clean it up. Basically, they use debuggers as crutches.