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Re:As a developer, my most important tools are a pen and a n... by coderenegade on Wednesday May 28, 2025 @07:32PM (#44121545)
My bread and butter at one point was working on various pathfinding and numerical computing problems, and I'm primarily a print statement debugger. The time evolution of the system is usually the most important signal for debugging these types of problems, and is easy to dump.

That's not to say I don't also use debuggers when necessary, I just reserve those for very hairy problems that can't be solved any other way, e.g. stepping into dependencies. Let's not forget that debuggers have their limitations too, e.g. release build GC optimization (or indeed any release-only bug), and any init process where you have to attach the debugger after the startup, fundamentally cannot be debugged using debuggers.

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