> John Carmack once pointed out that people who come from the game dev and Windows/PC world use debuggers while people from the linux and web dev world tend not to. It seems to be a matter of preference/taste, and I think FP programmers seem to have a distaste for debuggers and graphical debugging/development environments
i think that's true! but i don't think it's purely a matter of preference; it's also a matter of what the ecosystems support well and what you're trying to achieve. lisp is a huge exception to the rule about fp programmers; lisp systems, even including emacs, have extremely strong debugging support. but non-lisp fp languages tend to heavily emphasize static typing, thinking things through ahead of time, and correctness by construction, which reduce the need for debugging. but those are more valuable for writing compilers than for writing games or uis in general, where it's hard to define what counts as 'correct' ahead of time but easy to recognize it when you test it interactively
webdev of course has the problem that you can't stop your http response handler while the browser is waiting for a response. and, often, it's sadly not very concerned with ux. and it's often concerned with operating systems in a way where you have to debug problems after they occur, in part because of the scale of the problems
automated testing is another ecosystem thing that reduces the need for debuggers; to a significant extent it competes with static typing
one of the things i really appreciate about godot is being able to continuously adjust parameters and observe variables in my games as they're running. godot is motherfucking awesome, man. i definitely don't have a distaste for graphical debugging and development environments!
> breakpoints also provide stack traces, so they provide a kind of history as well. I'd rather inspect and interact with a program than dig through thousands of lines of logs (...) print debugging is tedious and requires restarting the program from the beginning whenever you make a change to the source
oh, see, i have programs like grep and emacs that dig through thousands of lines of logs for me. often when i'm debugging from logs i don't run the program at all; i just look at the logs and the source code. sometimes the program is running someplace i can't interact with it—memorably, on some occasions, on a satellite out of range of the groundstation. and usually exceptions on python or java give me a pretty decent stack trace, though other log messages unfortunately don't
there's another ecosystem support issue here—although i've sometimes developed on systems that supported fix-and-continue (cmucl, gforth, squeak, basic-80, godot), python and gcc support it very poorly or not at all. so for me i have to restart the program from the beginning whenever i make a change to the source in any case, whether i'm doing printf debugging or not. godot, again, is a very nice exception to this rule, and incidentally lets me add print debugging to the game while it's running
one of the great things about a breakpoint debugger, from my point of view, is that it makes it possible to add logging after the fact to a running program without editing the source or restarting it
If you're literally "from the Linux world", you're probably younger and less experienced, and likely from a hobby background rather than CS or engineering.
Developers in Unix shops before the Linux era used debuggers.
Obviously, the GNU project developed a debugger for an audience. GNU wouldn't be a complete replacement for proprietary systems like Unix with only compilers, but no debugger.
i think that's true! but i don't think it's purely a matter of preference; it's also a matter of what the ecosystems support well and what you're trying to achieve. lisp is a huge exception to the rule about fp programmers; lisp systems, even including emacs, have extremely strong debugging support. but non-lisp fp languages tend to heavily emphasize static typing, thinking things through ahead of time, and correctness by construction, which reduce the need for debugging. but those are more valuable for writing compilers than for writing games or uis in general, where it's hard to define what counts as 'correct' ahead of time but easy to recognize it when you test it interactively
webdev of course has the problem that you can't stop your http response handler while the browser is waiting for a response. and, often, it's sadly not very concerned with ux. and it's often concerned with operating systems in a way where you have to debug problems after they occur, in part because of the scale of the problems
automated testing is another ecosystem thing that reduces the need for debuggers; to a significant extent it competes with static typing
one of the things i really appreciate about godot is being able to continuously adjust parameters and observe variables in my games as they're running. godot is motherfucking awesome, man. i definitely don't have a distaste for graphical debugging and development environments!
> breakpoints also provide stack traces, so they provide a kind of history as well. I'd rather inspect and interact with a program than dig through thousands of lines of logs (...) print debugging is tedious and requires restarting the program from the beginning whenever you make a change to the source
oh, see, i have programs like grep and emacs that dig through thousands of lines of logs for me. often when i'm debugging from logs i don't run the program at all; i just look at the logs and the source code. sometimes the program is running someplace i can't interact with it—memorably, on some occasions, on a satellite out of range of the groundstation. and usually exceptions on python or java give me a pretty decent stack trace, though other log messages unfortunately don't
there's another ecosystem support issue here—although i've sometimes developed on systems that supported fix-and-continue (cmucl, gforth, squeak, basic-80, godot), python and gcc support it very poorly or not at all. so for me i have to restart the program from the beginning whenever i make a change to the source in any case, whether i'm doing printf debugging or not. godot, again, is a very nice exception to this rule, and incidentally lets me add print debugging to the game while it's running
one of the great things about a breakpoint debugger, from my point of view, is that it makes it possible to add logging after the fact to a running program without editing the source or restarting it
i really appreciate you sharing your experience!