I know profilers and debuggers are a boon for productivity, but anecdotally I’ve found they’re seldom used. How often do you use debuggers/profilers in your work? What’s preventing you? conversely, what enables you to use them?
I know profilers and debuggers are a boon for productivity, but anecdotally I’ve found they’re seldom used. How often do you use debuggers/profilers in your work? What’s preventing you? conversely, what enables you to use them?
That’s an interesting point about depending too heavily on a debugger. I haven’t run into anyone too dependent on it, but I could see that happening.
To me, debuggers offer a tighter dev loop when there’s something you’re stuck on. They also let you ‘grok’ a call stack in an unfamiliar codebase. “Did this function get called?” “What’s in this variable?” etc.
That I agree, I always see it as a critical necessity to always document everything when more than 1 developer work on the project. It like making a trade:
Spend time and effort debugging
Or
Spend time documenting and maintain it with the help of Chatgpt
With ChatGPT, it seems to reduce cost for documenting while same can’t be said for debugging.