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The Grug Brained Developer (2022)

(grugbrain.dev)
1087 points smartmic | 1 comments | 17 Jun 25 20:24 UTC | HN request time: 0.324s | source
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titanomachy ◴[17 Jun 25 23:45 UTC] 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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jmull ◴[18 Jun 25 13:44 UTC] No.44309836[source]▶
I find the differences between printf debugging and line debuggers (or whatever you call them) unimportant in most circumstances.

Line debuggers usually have some nice conveniences, but the major bottlenecks are between the ears, not in the tool.

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1. voidUpdate ◴[18 Jun 25 13:47 UTC] No.44309857[source]▶
I usually use a normal debugger to find a problem when I can see its symptoms but not the original caus. That way I can break on the line that is causing the symptom, check what the variables are like and go back up the call stack to find the origin of the incorrect state. I can do all that in one shot (maybe a couple if I need to break somewhere else instead) rather than putting prints everywhere to try and work out what the call stack is, and a load of prints to list off all the local variables