The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging

Re:The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging by CJefferson on Sunday April 25, 2021 @08:19AM (#26932163)

I agree, but my feeling is, if one person is bad at using debuggers it is their fault. If (as it seems to me) most developers are bad at using debuggers, then it's probably to debugger's (and associated tooling's) fault.

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Re:The unreasonable effectiveness of print debugging by pjmlp on Sunday April 25, 2021 @11:36AM (#26933527)

For me it is the teacher's fault, given that a large majority never teaches anything related to debuggers.

So we get generations that use vim and Emacs like notepad, create Makefiles by copy-paste and barely know gdb beyond set breakpoint, run, step and continue.

Using C as example, but feel free to extrapolate to another language.

And no I am not exaggerating, this was the kind of students I would get into my lab when I spent a year as TA in 1999/2000, and naturally would have to get them up to speed into good programming practices.

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