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1087 points smartmic | 3 comments | | HN request time: 0.615s | 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. slt2021 ◴[] No.44306799[source]
debugging is useful when your codebase is bad: imperative style, mutable state, weak type system, spaghetti code, state and control variables intermixed.

i'd rather never use debugger, so that my coding style is enforced to be clean code, strong type system, immutable variables, explicit error control, explicit control flow etc

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2. commandlinefan ◴[] No.44313623[source]
You've gotten downvoted but I think you're correct - if there were no debuggers, the developers would be forced to write (better) code that didn't need them.
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3. slt2021 ◴[] No.44315836[source]
Thank you for defending the common sense opinion. Some people here are too reactionary