[ajross]

Not to complain about bisect, which is great. But IMHO it's really important to distinguish the philosophy and mindspace aspect to this book (the "rules") from the practical advice ("tools").

Someone who thinks about a problem via "which tool do I want" (c.f. "git bisect helps a lot"[1]) is going to be at a huge disadvantage to someone else coming at the same decisions via "didn't this used to work?"[2]

The world is filled to the brim with tools. Trying to file away all the tools in your head just leads to madness. Embrace philosophy first.

[1] Also things like "use a time travel debugger", "enable logging", etc...

[2] e.g. "This state is illegal, where did it go wrong?", "What command are we trying to process here?"

[gregthelaw]

I've spent the past two decades working on a time travel debugger so obviously I'm massively biassed, but IMO most programmers are not nearly as proficient in the available debug tooling as they should be. Consider how long it takes to pick up a tool so that you at least have a vague understanding of what it can do, and compare to how much time a programmer spends debugging. Too many just spend hour after hour hammering out printf's.

[CJefferson]

I find the tools are annoyingly hard to use, particularly when a program is using a build system you aren't familiar with. I love time travelling debuggers, but I've also lost hours to getting large java, or C++ programs, into any working debuggers along with their debugging symbols (for C++).

This is one area where I've been disappointed by rust, they cleaned up testing, and getting dependencies, by getting them into core, but debugging is still a mess with several poorly supported cargo extensions, none of which seem to work consistently for me (no insult to their authors, who are providing something better than nothing!)

[codr7]

Different mindsets, I find many problems easier to reason about from traces.

It's very rare for me to use debuggers.

[nottorp]

Just be careful to not contradict #3 “Quit thinking and look”.

[ajross]

Touché