[breatheoften]

I hate this article and disagree strongly with the ideas presented.

“Debuggable” code is written in a certain style — just like “testable” code.

I consider a codebase to be good when there are meaningful places to put break points sufficient for running learning experiments about the code. Just like a codebase with “tests” is often a better codebase as a result of being written in a way that supports testing - a codebase that supports debugging can also often be a better codebase. And these work well together putting break points in test cases is often a really great idea!).

I think one of the reasons the value of the debugger so often fails to be noticed by experienced developers is that so many systems are architected in a horrific way which really does not allow easy debugger sessions — or the debugger platform is so underpowered that debugging is unreliable. There’s nothing worse than not trusting the debugger interface — “i want to do an experiment where I run code from here up to here” needs to be easy to describe and reliable to execute otherwise it is too much pain for the gain. In my opinion, failure to make this easy is not a fault of the concept of debugger but a fault of the codebase or the tooling (which often is very inadequate).