DEV Community

Discussion on: Here's What You Can Learn In 10 Minutes That Will Be Useful For The Rest Of Your Programming Career

Collapse
 
theodesp profile image
Theofanis Despoudis

Debugging actually takes a long time. There is a famous quote.

"The most effective debugging tool is still careful thought, coupled with judiciously placed print statements." - Brian W. Kernighan

I find that more to the point.

Collapse
 
structed profile image
Johannes Ebner ☁🎮 • Edited

It should not. However, I do see there are languages and environments, where setting up a debugger may be hard.
But most people are application developers and don't do embedded etc. Those folks should really only use a debugger if possible (yeah, parallel programming indeed is a prob here) because usually it's even faster than printing, gives a lot more info, you can usually change stuff in the process and you don't forget print statements which may find their way into a public release.

I am working mostly with .NET Core and starting to debug is a matter of pressing one single keyboard key. Writing a debug print statement is actually more effort to me.

Collapse
 
vinaypai profile image
Vinay Pai

Kernighan said that in 1979. I don't know if you've noticed, but software and tools have evolved a little bit since then.