Anticlue

When are debuggers useful?

Debugging is a tedious task. The tediousness grows exponentially, when you don’t have an understanding of the language, architecture, or framework. At this point, I think having a debugger is a great tool, especially one that allows you to step through the code. We aren’t always in the luxury position of having to fix a problem with code that we developed, in a language that we have an understanding of. Sometimes we are asked to do what is necessary. For instance last week, my teammate and I were asked to look at some C++ code and figure out what it was doing. Now, it has been about 8 years since I last wrote anything in C++, and I haven’t used a heck of a lot of pointers in web development lately. So I was brushing off the cobwebs to say the least. The debugger with the watch of certain variables was invaluable to determining the issue with the code.

However, as one becomes familiar with a technology, a developer finds that they use the debugger with a lot less frequency, relying on test cases to find issues with code as mentioned in Sean’s blog.