[pavon]

When I use a debugger I often feel like I'm looking through a soda straw. I can only see the state at that one instance in time. Just because I know the line of code where the exception occurred, doesn't tell me which data caused it, and breaking on exceptions is often too late. Instead I'm stuck hitting continue over and over until I finally see something out of place, realize I went to far and have to start over again. With logging, I have the entire history at my fingertips which I can skim or grep to quickly pinpoint the data that caused things to go wrong.

More fairly, it is a trade-off with the debugger giving wide visibility into state, but narrow visibility temporally, and logging giving narrow visibility into state (just what you logged), but broad temporal visibility. They both have their place, but I find that logging narrows things down more quickly, while the debugger helps me understand the problem by walking through step-by-step, assuming the problem isn't obvious once narrowed down.

[matheusmoreira]

Would be nice if instead of break points debuggers had log points which stored the values of variables at that point in time. This data can be displayed as a table later.

[roca]

You might be interested in Pernosco: see https://pernos.co/about/overview/ and its related content.

We agree with your critique of traditional debuggers and Pernosco tackles that "temporal visibility" problem head on.

[jonnycomputer]

I more or less agree; but I find myself wondering why I so often use Matlab's debugger, but almost never use pdb for python. It is not like I'm not used to using command line tools (I use bash, git, emacs, etc. everyday). It could just be an accident of habit, I don't know.