Divisions of labor

[Cameron Laird]

On Wed, Sep 22, 2004 at 02:25:45PM -0400, Jeremy Jones wrote:
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> 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.
> 
> 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>.
> 
> 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.
> 
> 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:
> 
> I have an intense interest in this narrative, and little
> ability yet to articulate why.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Jeremy Jones

My newsfeed appears erratic; delays in my replies are not editorial comments.

Mr. Jones, I'm unoffended.  I once *was* a debugger guru (expert in several
debuggers, in fact); those are skills I've chosen to let lapse.  Nowadays, I
feel more benefit in thinking about, for example, monads and categories.

I don't know what else to say.  I am ever on the lookout for advantages a
clever debugger will give me.  It's simply been years since I've noticed any.