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Discussion on: Juniors Literally Can't Write Switch Statements: What Senior PHP Developers Need to Focus On

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Jeroen De Dauw

Perhaps we are not in disagreement after all, at least not very much.

In my opinion using debuggers teaches you bad habits. You should not need a debugger. It is one of many things inside of PHPStorm that IMO you should not use. I've been using PHPStorm for years and not used the debugger for at least 4 now.

That said, I think junior devs, and all devs, should still use IDEs such as PHPStorm, to make sure they have access to:

  • Static analysis showing immediate feedback on bugs and code smells
  • Navigation capabilities such as "go to definition", "show all implementations", "find all usages", etc.
  • Strong auto-completion
  • Safe refactorings at least for basic things such as renaming stuff and inlining variables