Kernighan and Pike on debugging
While reading the log4j manual, I came across this excellent quote from Brian W. Kernighan and Rob Pike’s “The Practice of Programming”:
As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
+1 to that.
Tags: brian-kernighan, coding, debugging, log4j, logging, programming, rob-pike, software
Marcus Ramberg said,
January 8, 2007 @ 8:53 pm
+1 to that from me as well. I agree 100% :)
Aidan Kehoe said,
January 10, 2007 @ 11:46 am
Neither of you write much C lately, I suspect …
I find I use debuggers more when dealing with other people’s code, people who aren’t to hand and whose thought processes I don’t necessarily get.
Michael Sander said,
January 12, 2007 @ 1:42 am
What is needed is a debugger that puts printf’s everywhere. A debugger where you can step backwards and check out the programs state after it executed. Such debuggers exist… check em out: TimeMachine: C/C++ http://www.ghs.com/products/timemachine.html Amber: C/C++ (Still in development) OmniCore: Java – http://www.Omnicore.com There are plenty of others too!
a said,
October 15, 2010 @ 7:44 pm
that was written before eclipse. it doesn’t apply today if you’re using java or other programming language for which eclipse’s (or vs’s) visual debugger is fully integrated.