🚀 go-pugleaf

In <46g46d$aeg@fsuj01.rz.uni-jena.de> vkk@rz.uni-jena.de (Karl Kleine) writes:

>The point I want to make: I went back from industry to teaching last year,
>and in my introductory programming courses (based onm Modula-2) I do NOT
>introduce a debugger. I insist on CONSTRUCTING programs, not fiddling until
>it works. The debugger is sketched and demonstrated towards the end of term
>with small groups during the practical hands-on sessions. As Robert pointed
>out above, I use the debugger to get a traceback, maybe look at a variable
>value, but then it's reading and understanding the source code again.

I definitely agree with this point (even if I'm a C programmer :-) but
not all of us are lucky enough to have to debug _only_ code written by
ourselves.  You get a large program (>100,000 lines) developed by someone
who left long ago or by a company which no longer exists and which is
usually uncommented and are asked to fix a bug ASAP.  Try to solve such
a problem without making extensive use of a debugger.

There is a place for a debugger in any programmer's toolbox.  And, like
any other tool, it can be used or misused.

Dan
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland