🚀 go-pugleaf

A couple of people have pointed out that debuggers can be
very useful when debugging existing code that you have inherited.
One of the main uses I have for debuggers is tracking down
documentation problems or bugs in 3rd party libraries.  We use
many such libraries for imaging, ocr, text retrieval, etc.  When
things go wrong, you frequently find that what the documentation
says is not what is really happining, e.g. a function that is
supposed to return 0 or -1 is actually returning positive values.
Or worse, is not returning at all!  You can imbed printfs or
MessageBoxes in your code to try to figure out what is going on,
or use a debugger.  I generally use a debugger.

I've also had bugs caused by bad code generation by my compiler.
I found the bug by single stepping in a debugger.

If I were interviewing someone who said they didn't have any
experience using a debugger, I would suspect that they didn't have
any experience on large, real-world development projects.

Maybe there are good painters who have never dripped on the carpet, 
but I would rather have a good painter who knows how to clean up a 
mistake than one who doesn't.

--
Pete Humphrey
pete@swcp.com