On Thursday, 2 October 2014 at 15:29:17 UTC, ketmar via
Digitalmars-d wrote:
sure, i'm not a guru and just talking about personal expirience
here. i
found myself much more productive after throwing interacteve
debuggers
out of the window. ;-)
Debugging preferences are very personal, I would think so. :-)
The first time I used an interactive source level debugger was in
the late 80s using Turbo Pascal, I thought it was magically
great, like a revelation! My reference was writing assembly and
using a monitor/disassembler to debug… Source level debugging was
quite a step up!
But I agree that debuggers can be annoying, reconfiguring them is
often more troublesome than just adding some printf() hacks. I
find them indispensable when I am really stuck though: "duh, I
have spent 15 minutes on this, time to fire up the debugger".
In environments like javascript/python I often can find the
problem just as fast by just using the interactive console if the
code is written in a functional style.
The more global state you have and the less functional your style
is, the more useful a debugger becomes IMO.