<snipped a great deal>
I'm dead serious when I think that debuggers brain-damange their users: debugging a program with a debugger instead of with a ton of println is *much* slower for me. not only because of the many layers of tool that have to run around my program, but also because logging forces you to think about a strategy, think about where the problems could be.. you
How is setting a breakpoint different from inserting a logging statement? Breakpoint locations need to be carefully chosen as well with strategy. Ofcourse if you get it wrong you don't loose much time, just reset and rerun, no recompiling needed.
If it wasn't for a debugger i would've spent so much more time getting to know the insides of cocoon. All i had to do was set a breakpoint somewhere in custom code and work my way up the calltrace to get a first feeling of how the cocoon internals are working.
You are both right.
Debuggers do brain-damange some users, and logging statements in some cases are the only way to see things happening in real-life with multiple threads (serverside *is* different).
On the other side debuggers can sometimes really speed things up, especially in the code-knowledge area, and some can collect data exactly like logging does, without manually stepping through each call.
Bottom line: the debugger and logging statements are nice hammers, but not all nails are created equal ;-)
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Nicola Ken Barozzi [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- verba volant, scripta manent -
(discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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