Snips from three notes above, with emphasis adjusted by me:

In my experience, most Perl programmers (in fact, most programmers) don't use the debugger at all.
but why forgo the benefits of such a powerful tool?
Because some people find they get more benefit using other techniques.

the debugger is a sign that I've fouled up earlier

About the only time I use the debugger now is when poking at other peoples code and doing exploratory testing

Do you see how you contradict your own argument and/or misunderstood the original point?

Using the debugger need not be a sign that one doesn't know how to write code well. I guess there are people who use the debugger as a crutch and spend hours single-stepping through code aimlessly hoping to understand what they did wrong. I assume that because I've heard several people complain about such. I've never seen that. What I have often seen is someone wasting a lot of time trying to track down a problem when I can tell that this type of problem is likely easy to explore in a debugger and I would have found the problem quickly using a debugger.

There are certainly stupid ways to try to use a debugger. And I still find that people who dislike debuggers are those who don't know how to use a debugger effectively. I like debuggers. I don't use them that often. But when I've used them, they were often invaluable. There are many bugs and non-bug problems that debuggers are not well suited for trying to solve. And sometimes it is hard to predict whether you've got a problem that a debugger will be useful against.

But the debugger is a powerful tool and there are a lot of people (in my experience, the majority of programmers) who have never learned how to use this tool well (or even at all).

- tye        

In reply to Re^4: Interactive scripting with DB by tye
in thread Interactive scripting with debugger by tlm

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