[uwuemu]

You can't possibly call yourself a "professional developer" (and it sounds like you're not pointing out that you're paid for the work, but that you're a "pro") and then talk about debugging as something you rarely do. If debugging (with a debugger) is something you rarely do, you may be paid for your work, but I wouldn't call you a pro.

You should be debugging alongside development to gain deep understanding and reduce errors. No amount of "test" coverage can replace that.

I'm always skeptical about people who don't use IDEs and I'm almost always right about them. And it's not the good kind of being right.

[matthewmacleod]

That’s funny, because I’m always skeptical about people who fire in all judgy about the way other people work when they know literally nothing about who they are or what they do, and I am always right.

[selfhoster11]

I think that parent’s point was that debugging is an exceedingly powerful tool, and therefore leaving it out of your toolset by definition makes you less powerful as a programmer. It’s not even such an esoteric skill - operating the simplest kind of a GUI debugger is maybe learning 5-6 different actions, and the IDE often takes care of the details of setting up the debugger for you.

[jdbernard]

I don't know that I'm convinced of that point though. I've been developing software professionally for almost 20 years and my usage and reliance on a debugger has decreased over time. At the moment, I think it's been probably three months since I've last used one.

[bornfreddy]

This. I used to use debugger all the time as a more junior dev, but I haven't used one in years now. Also, over time I spend more and more time writing tests. When there's a problem a simple print, echo, console.log or whatever is usually enough to solve it quickly.

The problem that debuggers solve is simply not a big problem anymore, in my experience. Definitely not worth the setup hassle when actively working on multiple platforms.

[wruza]

On the contrary, I find a common debugger (see questions below) an underwhelming experience, not a powerful tool.

Can it:

- assign (scenario, subsystem, level, description) to breakpoints and watches, so they can be turned on/off or selected in groups for debugging without removal?

- commit these scenarios of bps and watches into a repository?

- edit/read them in a textual form to patch or share over an IM?

- store traces of previous sessions and diff them to find out what changed?

Does anything even remotely similar exist? Most debuggers are just test-pause-and-inspect tools with “integration” in the form of eval on mouse hover. Their ux and dx sucks and the only reason I could find to use them were slow build times and too low-level runtimes, which are no more today.

Pretty sure most people avoid debuggers not because they are too hard to learn (they aren’t), but because they are too dumb to be useful, given that you can ‘if (cond) log.level(…)’ and restart instantly.

[KallDrexx]

> - assign (scenario, subsystem, level, description) to breakpoints and watches, so they can be turned on/off or selected in groups for debugging without removal?

In Jetbrain's tools they definitely can. I can

* create a bunch of breakpoints

* give them descriptions

* only have them break on execution under certain conditions (conditions stated via the programming language being debugged, so `my_struct.some_func() == 5`)

* disable and enable breakpoints with a click of a button

* have a breakpoint only become active when another breakpoint got hit (and therefore only cause the debugging logic to execute in certain code paths

* Have a breakpoint not stop execution when it gets hit, which is useful because I can then

* Log when a breakpoint gets hit, including it's stack trace (so I can see exactly the flow that got me to that breakpoint)

* Evaluate some variable when a breakpoint is hit and log that evaluation.

All of this with an extremely simple UI that can be manipulated without any recompiles and while the application is running. I've gotten tons of value of debugging complex scenarios in both C# and Rust via this constructs.

So while I'm not going to convince you that debuggers are worthwhile, to call them "too dumb to be useful" is pretty naive.

[wruza]

Well, this is good to learn. I skimmed through intellij debugger docs before writing that comment and didn’t find anything like that. Thanks!

[KallDrexx]

A screenshot showing the UI for this is https://resources.jetbrains.com/help/img/idea/2022.2/cl_brea... (from https://www.jetbrains.com/help/clion/using-breakpoints.html). Though that screenshot doesn't show the description field, which definitely exists on my CLion build.

[selfhoster11]

That’s a fine opinion to hold, until you work on applications that you cannot debug for one reason or another.

As a fellow debugger lover, having to basically use log statements instead of being able to reach in and debug was a rude awakening. Some people probably don’t know that debugging can be easy with the right combination of IDE and language. Or the billion software layers mean that the debugger fails to attach for some reason which can’t be figured out.

[wruza]

I have a decent experience in all sorts of debuggers (from softice to gdb to ide) and prefer log() where possible. The reasons are: less-ing a log is superior to stepping into. Step-based debugging doesn’t work in production or retrospectively. That’s it.

[jen20]

This kind of post is unhelpful and unnecessary.

Debugging and using IDEs are entirely orthogonal. DTrace and lldb are far more valuable to me than a graphical step debugger, which I effectively never use. As it happens I use JetBrains IDEs full time.