[Tutor] IDE - Editors - Python

[Alan Gauld]

>  <grin> Avoid debuggers like a plague. If someone applies for a job
>         with us and starts talking about their proficiency in
>         debuggers, the interview stops right there and we keep looking.

grin noted but seriously, why?

I tend to take the opposite approach. A good understanding of debuggers
and how to use them will speed up the productivity of any developer,
often by a factor of two or three - much faster to set a breakpoint and
watch than to create multiple print statements and then take them all
out again after laboriously peering at lots of data.

OTOH much faster to insert one or two well chosen print statements
and find the bug rather than crank up a debugger. But if you need
more than a couple of prints then its probably faster to import pdb...

And of course scriptable debuggers are a great testing tool!

What has gotten debuggers a bad name is the trend with modern graphical
debuggers to just blindly step through the code line by line. Now that
is seriously inefficient! Its one reason I tend to use raw text debuggers
like gdb or dbx rather than the GUI variants - the te,mptattion to laziness
is avoided.

Alan g.