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1087 points smartmic | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.477s | source
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titanomachy ◴[] No.44305194[source]
“Good debugger worth weight in shiny rocks, in fact also more”

I’ve spent time at small startups and on “elite” big tech teams, and I’m usually the only one on my team using a debugger. Almost everyone in the real world (at least in web tech) seems to do print statement debugging. I have tried and failed to get others interested in using my workflow.

I generally agree that it’s the best way to start understanding a system. Breaking on an interesting line of code during a test run and studying the call stack that got me there is infinitely easier than trying to run the code forwards in my head.

Young grugs: learning this skill is a minor superpower. Take the time to get it working on your codebase, if you can.

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1. mikepurvis ◴[] No.44306145[source]
The rise of virtualization, containers, microservices, etc has I think contributed to this being more difficult. Even local dev-test loops often have something other than you launching the executable, which can make it challenging to get the debugger attached to it.

Not any excuse, but another factor to be considered when adding infra layers between the developer and the application.

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2. bluefirebrand ◴[] No.44306194[source]
Debuggers are also brittle when working with asynchronous code

Debuggers actually can hide entire categories of bugs caused by race conditions when breakpoints cause async functions to resolve in a different order than they would when running in realtime