What a good debugger can do
What a good debugger can do
When people say “debuggers are useless and using logging and unit-tests is much better,” I suspect many of them think that debuggers can only put breakpoints on certain lines, step-step-step through the code, and check variable values. While any reasonable debugger can indeed do all of that, it’s on...
I’m firmly in the print statement / console.log camp but this article convinced me to try using a debugger.
You are not alone
Are there seriously professionals out there who think debuggers are useless? That is utterly baffling to me. Logging and tests are useful, but if something unexpected happens, the debugger is absolutely the first tool I'm reaching for unless I'm dealing with remote code (e.g. on a server) or some other scenario where using a debugger is a pain.
No kidding! I don't think I've been without some kind of debugger since I was still just dicking around as a hobbyist. I can't even really guess, because it seems like forever. I know I didn't have access to a debugger on the VIC-20, but just when I first used one I can't say.
I tend to use print way to much especially considering the programming language I am using has a debugger built in and I dont use it nearly enough. ok I do use break so I can stop execution paired with printing but I really need to start actually using it. however yes debuggers are awesome if anyone hasn't tried one out give it a try, even if you are using a smaller lesser known language a lot of languages are more compatible than you think, I recently used windbg with the D programming language if you haven't heard of that language, exactly, so give your language of choice a few google searches and see if there are any that work.