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Cameron Laird wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="midtkl822-p6i.ln1@lairds.us" type="cite">
<pre wrap="">In article <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:1gkiywn.1ydvxr62u3q0dN%aleaxit@yahoo.com"><1gkiywn.1ydvxr62u3q0dN%aleaxit@yahoo.com></a>,
Alex Martelli <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:aleaxit@yahoo.com"><aleaxit@yahoo.com></a> wrote:
.
[much that deserves comment]
.
.
</pre>
<blockquote type="cite">
<pre wrap="">This is a reflection I had as a consequence of this episode. But if I
meet about two "super-horrible bugs" a year, and a perfect debugger
would save me 3 days or so in each case, I need to find one that I can
learn to use with perfect skill in less than 6 days, and keep
well-trained on at no cost. Half the incantations that WingIDE guru was
incanting were completely lost on me and the other guy helping us out in
that debugging -- if I took a week to learn it, and then didn't have any
need for it for months, I'd have to relearn it again 7 months later...
not a net win.
I was highly skilled back when I had to use MS Visual Studio to develop
and debug C++ code -- but it's the kind of skill my brain expunges as
fast as it possibly can, as soon as it becomes unused (as opposed to,
say, weird interesting facts about languages and libraries I may not
have used for years -- THOSE, for me, tend to stay around somewhere in
my brain!-)
</pre>
</blockquote>
<pre wrap=""><!----> .
.
.
I made almost exactly the same calculation, and certainly
came to the same conclusion.
This still leaves open the question of precisely what the
alternative is--to have eager debugger-savvy friends? I
think there's more to it. I'll likely return to this.
</pre>
</blockquote>
I hope that my following comments don't sound presumptuous or
antagonistic. This topic really interests me and I'd like to raise a
couple of questions about the above discussion for my own sake. Let me
assert up front that I am _far_ from a debugger guru. I'm
just starting to tinker around with it lately. My previous debugging
techniques centered around a bunch of "print" statements or log
entries, etc - but, I must say, they were fairly effective.<br>
<br>
Is it possible that this is a case of "what you don't know, you don't
know that you don't know"? Meaning, if you aren't (in this case) a
debugger guru, you don't know how much (more) you would use the
debugger for non-catastrophic bugs and how much more productive it
would make you (again, for non-catastrophic bugs, or things that aren't
even bugs)? All of programming isn't debugging, so becoming a master
of the debugger to the detriment of some other aspect of programming
(which Alex could fill in here with much more finesse than I could) is,
in my opinion, a mistake. But I just wonder how much I'm missing by
not being as proficient with the debugger. I guess the same could be
said regarding other tools - maybe even <duck> IDEs <run>.<br>
<br>
Another question that I'd like to raise is, does a one week investment
in time necessarily add up to one week in time? Meaning, if you
determine that you would like to become more adept at the debugger and
decide that you're going to spend your spare moments with it when
things are slow and there is little/nothing to do anyway, do you really
have anything invested in it compared to your productive activities?
Especially if the spare moments (which would have been spent surfing
Slashdot) result in an improvement of productivity immediately. I'm
not asserting that this is the case - just raising the question.<br>
<br>
Anyway, hope I don't sound like a butt on this. Both of my questions
are, interestingly, non-quantifiable. I guess I can empathize with
Cameron's statement:<br>
<pre wrap="">I have an intense interest in this narrative, and little
ability yet to articulate why.</pre>
I dunno. Maybe it's because I just started fumbling around with pdb
and this topic just struck a chord within me. Maybe it's because I've
got a personality flaw where I'm willing to "waste" spare time on
learning things that I feel _may_ (not _will_ - _may_) help me think in
different ways. Currently, I'm on a kick of wanting to "get"
functional programming. I don't know why, but I just feel like when I
"get" it, it'll help me think about other things in different and
better ways. Maybe that's just Eric S. Raymond's comments on Lisp
floating around in my head - or maybe David Mertz's articles on
functional programming.<br>
<br>
Jeremy Jones<br>
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