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I think a lot of “naturals” find visual debuggers pointless, but for people who don’t naturally intuit how a computer works it can be invaluable in building tha
by recursivedoubts 1y ago
I think a lot of “naturals” find visual debuggers pointless, but for people who don’t naturally intuit how a computer works it can be invaluable in building that intuition.
I insist that my students learn a visual debugger in my classes for this reason: what the "stack" really is, how a loop really executes, etc.
It doesn't replace thinking & print debugging, but it complements them both when done properly.
- sethjgore 1y agoWhat do you mean “visual debugger?”
- XorNot 1y agoPresumably an IDE rather then dealing the gdb CLI.
- travisgriggs 1y agoI think it depends on the debugger and the language semantics as well. Debugging in Swift/Kotlin, so so. The Smalltalk debugger was one of the best learning tools I ever used. “Our killer app is our debugger” doesn’t win your language mad props though.
- knome 1y agoI don't often need gdb, but I appreciate the emacs mode that wraps it every time.
- porridgeraisin 1y agoIn vscode when you step to the next statement it highlights in the left pane the variables that change. Something like that. It's useful for a beginner e.g in a for loop to see how `i` changes at the end of the loop. And similarly with return values of functions and so on.
- recursivedoubts 1y agothe intellij debugger, for example, as opposed to a command line debugger
- ItsHarper 1y agoAgreed, I spent a lot more time using debuggers when I was getting started
- baobun 1y agoMight be something to this. I relied heavily on IDE debugger and was integral part of my workflow for a while as a yungin and but very rare that I bother these days (not counting quick breaks in random webapps). Perhaps been underappreciating the gap in mental intuition of the runtime between then and now and how much the debugger helped to bridge.