[throwaway894345]

I can believe there is value in learning a debugger, but debuggers could stand to improve significantly. Debugger UX is almost universally awful and per the parent it’s often difficult to get one up and running. Moreover, if you do your “print debugging” with log statements of the appropriate level, they can be useful in production which is perhaps the biggest value.

[corty]

Also, in almost all languages debuggers are an afterthought. Take e.g. the situation with Golang, Haskell or Python. Either there is no useful debugger or there is one, but it came late and still cannot debug everything the language does.

[hawkice]

Print debugging not (really) working is haskell is... Non-idea, and a bad pairing for bad real debugging. But test cases are usually easier to figure out. Presumably there's a balance discovered by people in big projects but it never seemed as good as normal approaches to me.

[corty]

Haskell debugging by testing is great for small functions where you can use quickcheck. But larger tests for the more complicated stuff don't work in quickcheck and there isn't much else that one can easily do.

[Quekid5]

Not sure what you mean, there's e.g. Tasty for non-QC testing. It can do all sorts of variations of test, e.g. traditional unit tests, "golden" tests, etc.

[slaymaker1907]

I haven't actually used quickcheck in Haskell, but I've used it for very complicated tests in other languages including Racket, TypeScript, Rust, and Java. The nicest thing about quickcheck is that it lets you easily create test data without imposing too many constraints on it. Regular fuzzing or randomized testing is almost as good, but the narrowing done by quickcheck is sometimes nice for understanding test failures.

[kaba0]

On the other hand, it is reall great in case of the JVM

[Too]

Not sure what situation you are talking about. Debugging Python is as easy as right-clicking a file in Pycharm and pressing debug. Why care if it was an afterthought when it for the past decade has worked perfectly.

[corty]

I care. That it has worked for the last decade only means that Python was without a working debugger for 2/3 of its existence. 1/3 of which I had to suffer from it.

Also, pycharm isn't really what I would call a proper debugger yet, attaching remote running processes for example just doesn't work reliably yet and is very new anyways. Debugging embedded targets just doesn't work. Multithreading is iffy (but that's unfortunately normal in Python).

[throwaway894345]

Also needing to use a particular text editor to use a decent debugger is bananas.