John D. Mitchell's Blog

Are debuggers a wasteful timesink?

Bob Martin starts a raucous discussion when he states that Debuggers are wasteful Timesinks.

To paraphrase a character from the last Matrix movie... Debuggers are just a tool. It is how the tool is used that is good or bad.

Comments

• The problem with debuggers....
  They are practically useless to me because all my code is open source and multi threaded and there is no way to run a debugger on somebody else's machine ( especially in the brave new world of firewalls). More-over debuggers are only marginally useful in a multi-threaded environment. I prefer to liberally sprinkle the code with assertion checks and debug println so that it essentially carries its own debugging code and people can send me a debug log file. I also like to use new Exception().printStackTrace() in this context which frightens unsuspecting users but helps debug their code. It would be nice to have java do a stack dump but alas the stack is not available to the application as an object.

  Posted by: mranga on December 16, 2003 at 05:08 AM

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