I know profilers and debuggers are a boon for productivity, but anecdotally I’ve found they’re seldom used. How often do you use debuggers/profilers in your work? What’s preventing you? conversely, what enables you to use them?
As a C# programmer I use the debugger every single day, since it’s so natural and easy to use as to just run the application. I’ve grow spoiled actually, when I program in Go or Rust I really miss the “it just works” debugger.
I’ve used a debuggers only a handful of times in the last decade or so. The projects I work on have complex stacks, are distributed, etc. The effort to get that to run in a debugger is simply not worth it, logging and testing will do 99.9% of the time. Profiling on the other hand, now that’s useful, especially on prod or under prod load.
I recently started doing xeyes debugging.
We have so many debug logs that trying to find your log of a background takes a non zero amount of time.
So just inserting
system("xeyes");is actually way easier, to get instant feedback, and you can just usesystem("xmessage msg"), if you need a message.That makes me so happy.
I have a tendency to just use console logging, and only use debuggers when things are starting to get hairy.
I used to just use print statements and avoided debuggers because I didn’t understand it. But as I’ve gotten more experienced, it’s become my first choice in debugging now (go figure haha).
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How do people do stuff without debuggers? :D
Another way to develop would be through iterating within a Unit Test that you don’t plan to keep around.
Uh, I set a breakpoint and run the app?
To add a bit more context, it’s more difficult to configure a debugger when the application is running within something like Docker. How difficult? That depends on the language and tools you’re using.
I’ve seen the fun of “prints everywhere” in production when a colleague forgot to remove a “Why the fuck do you end up here?” followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix… Customers weren’t to amused…
Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page
