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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report

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Debugger as Drug 2 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • I learned programming before debuggers became available. My theory was "understand what you write, never outwrite ahead of your brain". And when that failed, "add print until it works".

    I never realized how much this influences my coding style until I was recently in front of 30 people at a client location, writing some complex code in real time for them. I'd write three or four lines of code, run the program, then either rewrite those three or four lines if they didn't do what I expect, or I'd write th

    --
    • Randal L. Schwartz
    • Stonehenge
    • My counter to this would be that you're often debugging *someone else's* code, and that's where debuggers can be a lifesaver, or simply help you find a bug in someone's module on CPAN.

      I sometimes use a debugger as a way to graphically represent complex data structures that I don't understand and I'm not sure how deeply nested they are (i.e. where print statements won't necessarily work).

      But on the whole, yes, they can make you lazy.

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