Actually, I think many people don’t use them. We surely didn’t learn to use it at uni, and I still encounter many people that doesn’t use them. With the excellent debugger in Eclipse I am convinced I am a lot more productive than without. I guess they can be kind of complicated at first, but once I learned to use it I can’t live without. I no longer have to rely on print statements for displaying info, and no need for adding another print and rerunning every time I figure I need to inspect another object. Unix girl even seems to have had an argument over using debuggers. 🙂
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3 replies on “Some people don’t use debuggers”
I only ever used on when doing C/C++ programming to get a stack trace when my program crashed. Usually I’ve found that by reading and understanding the code you can track down the real problem much more quickly. There’s no shortcut around understand the code you are debugging and a debugger, for me, just makes the whole process take longer (once I have a stack trace that is)
completetly agree. I am sick and tired of seeing debug.log or println when in instances where they should have been using a debugger in the first place.
Maybe the ideal thing would be if I could read and understand all the code in our system, but there simply isn’t enough time. And some of the time I don’t even have the code.
And, hey, everyone uses println/logging don’t they? Most of the time debugging is just a replacement for them to inspect the state at various points.