Hey, Don’t Dump. Debug!

“Out of curiosity, I also ask other coders about debugging
techniques, and more often than not, I am surprised by the answer.
Believe it or not, the vast majority relies on liberal “print”
statements sprinkled throughout code. Of course, “print” takes many
forms–dump pertinent data structures, emit trace statements to
standard error, and log interim results in a separate file–and
there are cases where these methods are mandated. Still, it puzzles
me why more skilled developers do not use a debugger. Extensions to
PHP allow for interactive forensics; Perl running within mod_perl
supports debugging; and Ruby on Rails’s Mongrel provides the
-debugger option to interrupt execution and drop to a debug
console. “In my Rails work, I use the debugger extensively. The
debugger combines the power of the Rails console and the
Interactive Ruby Debugger, irb, and peers into running code
responding to incoming requests. Better yet, I can yield to the
debugger console anywhere–in a controller, a view, a plug-in or
helper. Within the debugger, I can inspect the stack, variables,
the params hash, and more.

Complete
Story