I come from the php world now coding in python. There used to be a very nice library from Symfony called VarDumper: https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/var_dumper.html that would just pretty print variables you dumped to the browser in an easy to consume form. Is there anything like this in python?
There is pretty-print [0], which you could dump inside pre tags, or print to stdout. But honestly, depending on the framework, quicker options exist than (basically) printf debugging.
Pretty much the stuff already mentioned elsewhere on HN for this article. I often find Werkzeug's excellent debugger is enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718869 . pdb/ipdb/pudb et al (pick your fav) can help for really tricky stuff. And sufficient logging, so you know what's going on at all times even without a debugger attached.
(occasionally, the low effort of print-debugging works, but if you keep having to print in more/different locations... it's a blunt tool IMO)
I try to have "debug calls" that I can call from the browser or Postman or Swagger, etc. and return all sorts of debug information, etc.
I have the impression that local program-specific debugging tools quickly evolve into something like functional tests that uncover issues that functional tests proper might not cover. For example, if I'm serving a ML model but I have a debug call that runs sanity checks on the data that are too expensive to run each time.
I think there is a difference because python doesnt require a web browser to run. People are just running programs with no web UI or webserver etc... If you really wanted, you could pipe your debug prints to a file and load in a browser if that is what you want :p
