Re:The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging
by fauigerzigerk on Sunday April 25, 2021 @03:25AM
(#26930971)
Why would I do this manually using some fiddly UI instead of automating it using the programming language I already have at my fingertips?
Using the programming language itself, I can extract exactly the information I need to see, transform it into exactly the shape that's easiest for me to inspect and combine output from different places in the code to create a compact list of state changes that's easy for my eyes to scan.
What I have found is that my debugging problems are either too simple to require anything more than thinking or too data dependent for a debugger to be the best tool for the job.
Using the programming language itself, I can extract exactly the information I need to see, transform it into exactly the shape that's easiest for me to inspect and combine output from different places in the code to create a compact list of state changes that's easy for my eyes to scan.
What I have found is that my debugging problems are either too simple to require anything more than thinking or too data dependent for a debugger to be the best tool for the job.