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Nelson Minar
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The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled
with judiciously placed print statements.
Twenty-five years later this still seems true. Most programmers I
know debug by printing stuff out. Even Linus Torvalds has famously
criticized debuggers.
— Brian Kernighan,
UNIX
for Beginners, 1979.
Why is that? It's not technology - there are some beautiful integrated debuggers that let you hook deep into running code and poke around. And it's not ignorance, at least for me - I've had many happy experiences with fancy debuggers in the past. But I still keep going back to printing stuff out. Why? For me it's about simplicity. Running a debugger on an active process is often awkward. And it's a bit spooky: I never quite fully understand what's going on. Still I can't help but feel like I'm working with stone age tools. |
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