Re:Hey, Don't Dump. Debug
by juliusdavies on Friday May 01, 2009 @01:13PM
(#588773)
If you scan the internet, you'll find most comment threads on this topic get the Brian W. Kernighan quote posted to them at least once:
As Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike put it in their truly excellent book "The Practice of Programming":
* * *
As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
As Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike put it in their truly excellent book "The Practice of Programming":
* * *
As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
* * *
http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/manual.html