Real developers don't use debuggers. They stare deep into the screen and let the code confess

I don't use debuggers. I just stare down until the code confesses.

I actually talked to my duck. He solved my Server 500 error which said "java.lang.NoSuchFieldError: logger". I had to purge the build .class files and recompile the application and low and behold it runs.

Why is my duck a better debugger than most actual debuggers? He didn't even go to college!

A basket full of debugging buddies.

The problem with working on a debugger for a living is that you can end up debugging a debugger debugging a debugger that is remotely debugging a debugger which is debugging a program...

...only to find out there's a bug in the first debugger and you need to debug it.

My new debuggers ...

Let's play russian roulette!

[ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo \"You live\"

When I learnt programming, sugar was still made out of salt and hence not used in coffee.

Also, we didn't have source level debuggers, only the "print" method. However, compiling was also slow. It was faster and more convenient to go through the program and execute the statements in one's head. This helped understanding what code is doing just by reading it. It also kept people from trial and error programming, something that some people fall for when they resort to single step debugging in order to understand what their own code is even doing.

Compiling was slow because computers in general were slow, like single digit MHz. That enforced programming efficient code. It's also why we learnt about big Oh notation already at school. Starting with manual resource management helped to get a feeling for what's going on under the hood.

Interviewer: Do you have any experience with debuggers?
Me: *Slowly cracking a smile*
Me:

since people sharing their rubber duck debuggers, this is mine

Debuggers are for pussies real men use print("aa") everywhere.

Ok, sorry.
I'll go now

They don't use debuggers, they stare down until the code confesses.

Debuggers are a good invention 🙂

To all Developers and Debuggers!

None of debuggers can beat me! Cuz I'm really good rebugger!

Ugh! Salseforce! Fuuuuuck youuuuuu!

I have worked with C++, Java (little bit), Javascript, Python, R for so many years without any complaints ever! But this shit makes me feel so incompetent. Maybe I am actually incompetent but lack of constraints and good debuggers helped me hide that till date. 😭

Idk. I'm going to sleep.

VS Code for sure. Same experience on win/*nix systems, built in debuggers, terminals, flexible configuration. I am so deep in love and can't recommend it more

all that decades spent on debuggers, strict typing, static analyzers, fucking unit tests
ima put frogs in my code so they eat bugs
S̸ ̶T̶ ̵O̴ ̴N̵ ̶K̶ ̸S̷

My golden rule of debugging - Isolate issues by changing one unit of code at a time. Keep everything else constant.
Second most helpful rule - pick up the habit of fixing things by reviewing code, instead of relying on debuggers. Make you so much more aware of possible pitfalls while coding itself.

Good Debugging Skills are underrated.
Best debuggers are good problem solvers.

That’s IT!!! I’m throwing in the towel, I’m sick of IDEs crashing and bloating up Code, zero transparency. And tired of shitty incircuit debuggers breaking.

Going old school again, give me a text editor, terminal, a scope and a com line, I’ll be fine.

Fuck the text editor just give me a terminal, OSC scope and com line.

I don't use debuggers.
Is stare down until the code confesses.-Chuck Norris

My Mentor during the 1st year of my College

Set High Expectations and very frequently used to throw insults and shame me as if I knew nothing. And he was not wrong. I sucked so bad. Did learn some basics and promoted me one level from the "total newbie" state

But my best Mentor would have to be my PCs, Compilers, Debuggers. Couldn't find a better one

Everyone seems to enjoy posting their debuggers so meet the team:
Slash, Classic Duck, Varys, and a Son of the Harpy repainted to look like my D&D character courtesy of my roommate

Spent two hours looking all over my code with so many debuggers I was about to crap and BOOM found you can't use "dec" for a table or string name in PHP. Just typing December would have saved me hours. Not sure why but put ticks around it and everything was fine. I put this one on htmltypos.com so others can figure it out. May be `dec` is shorthand for dechex....?

I guess debuggers or kind of like the gramma nazis of the coding world.

Part of one of the workarounds for Dirty COW is to disable ptrace.

ptrace is generally needed by debuggers.

I am team lead for L2 support at a company which makes a debugger.

RedHat are now shipping this workaround.

*ducks for cover*

A friend just asked his colleagues why IntelliJ can't do reverse debugging and was told that it's impossible. It's not impossible, gdb does it, pdb does it. Probably other debuggers do it too.

Why do many devs believe that if they haven't heard of something, it doesn't exist?

My 20 rubber apparently ducklings arrived.. Yes, its a standard 3x3 cube..
Anyone know where i can purchase a bigger duck for around $5 without paying $12 for shipping?

Sadly took me a little longer than I’d like to admit to go from well placed print statements to using a debugger. Granted there are times when print statements are needed, but for all the devs out there who are using an IDE with a perfectly good debugger and yet doesn’t use it... please use it. It literally gives you a mapping of all objects and data types around a break point that you can easily glance at to speed up debugging. Go figure!

My first project was a pacman game made with AS1 in flash 6, I learned a lot and it made me appreciate debuggers, proper programming languages and to love making games, however that game was unbeatable thanks to ghosts having the same speed as pacman and using path finding algorithm with no error margin so they always catch you!

This is just me throwing out my thoughts from the past few weeks.

edit: this is long

> Working on a C# project. its going well Its teaching me a lot about SQLite and file IO. I'm having a lot of fun with it, even the debugging as much I want to slam my head on the wall but I'm not asking for help so far and I'm very proud of myself because it feels so much better. like I don't mind asking for help but its so much more rewarding and I learn more from it.

> I need portfolio of software I can show off to employers and the current project I'm working on is the first programs in the portfolio. The place I want to apply to uses C#, but I still wanted a few other programs in other languages such as Python or JS just to show what I'm capable of.

> I was looking at what ASP.NET Core offers and it impresses the fuck out of me, and confuses me. The parts that confuse me, like for example the normal asp webapp is a very impressive hello world app. and it has so many different files and such but how or what do they expect me to add? how am I supposed to work with it? and if I delete any files I don't need (the premade js, bootstrap, jquery, html, and css) it produces errors because of the project files are pointing to those. and i know I can use the empty project (I do) but does that question my ability as a dev since I don't want to use it for my projects?

> On that note I love using Intellisense and debuggers and auto complete and I can go without them I just don't want to rely on them. idk I've just been a little more stressed these past few weeks.

I'll have to make some tough choices over the next 6 months. With my tech career beginning and my college education ramping up, time is of the essence, and the skills I develop now will be at the forefront of my future. So what does this have to do with Microsoft?

Well, the story begins in the Spring of 2016. Social Forums was about to turn a year old, Trump's campaign was ramping up, and I had just found my love for technology. With all my friends having phones, I had to get a phone and get working on development. The year before, Windows 10 was launched, and I was psyched. I found Microsoft's products to be underrated with potential. That day, I purchased a Lumia 640, upgraded it to Windows 10, and immediately began working. After another year-and-a-half gone by, I went from loving Microsoft, to defending Microsoft, to tolerating Microsoft. I could go on and on about the lousy structure, the privacy issues, the forced upgrades, the redundant developer platform, and other such issues that is leading me away from them. But if there is one thing they have proven over the years, is that the they are completely out of touch with its developers and its customers. They spent years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their phones. They failed. They spend years ramping up their semi-annual OS updates. They failed. So why did they fail? It's not that they made the wrong prediction out of chance. They legitimately don't care about feedback. It's their way or the highway. This sounds vaguely familiar. They have been spending a decade ignoring feedback from the community because they want to become just like Apple. Right now, Apple LIVES off of brand loyalty and its stable, useful ecosystem. This cannot work for Microsoft as they don't have a lot of brand loyalty. But most of all, they don't have a working ecosystem. They have Windows Insiders, which provides them with hundreds of feedback messages per day. These include suggestions, bug reports, and constructive criticism. The feedback is public. You can have several pages of the same complaint, and they still won't do anything about it. They say they have a good relationship with their community, and that this Beta program helps Windows become better for all. But in the end, we are nothing more than a glorified unpaid labor force. They fired hundreds of professional debuggers just before the Insider Program took off. We are only here to provide bug reports for free. Now that their phones, AR headsets, browser, online services, and VR headsets are failing for all these reasons, I see little reason to develop for Windows anymore. I don't just mean their UWP and App Store platforms, I mean Windows as a whole. I'm definitely not a Mac guy either. I never see myself going to Mac either, as they are really no different in terms of how they treat their Developers and PC users. If things continue down this route, I will leave the platform all together. I've always wanted to be a Systems Programmer, so I don't really need an established paid platform to be successful. Even now, I'm not certain about leaving Windows altogether but as a developer, I need to find my place. Time is of the essence in my life, and I need to find out my place in the software world. Now I think it isn't on the Windows platform like I had dreamed it would be. But where do I go?

My university's IT department can't even install debuggers on the computers, so if we're on linux and need to debug something, we need to save the code to an usb stick, reboot to windows, boot a VM and install valgrind there (or manually install the needed .deb files, which ends up being even more of a hassle than just rebooting)

What's harder than debugging an uncaught exception in a view

If only debuggers like vs can attach to the server side logic of the views

If there's one thing that gets my goat it's "voodoo debuggers."

There's no actual need to dig into the root cause of a problem if you can blame the new thing you don't understand. Especially when later, after someone competent actually looks into it, the bug turns out to be a change in the old stuff that did it.

If there's two things that get my goat, it's people who fix something caused by human error or negligence and then don't write an automated test to catch it the next time it happens.