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<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.juliobiason.me"><h1>Julio Biason .Me 4.3</h1></a>
<p class="lead">Old school dev living in a 2.0 dev world</p>
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<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="&#x2F;">English</a></li>
<li class="sidebar-nav-item"><a href="&#x2F;pt">Português</a></li>
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<h1 class="post-title">Things I Learnt The Hard Way - Debuggers Are Overrated</h1>
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2019-07-08
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/books/">#books</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/things-i-learnt/">#things i learnt</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/debuggers/">#debuggers</a>
<a href="https://blog.juliobiason.me/tags/debugging/">#debugging</a>
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<p>I heard a lot of people complaining that code editors are bad 'cause it's hard
to attach a debugger. I'd claim that this vision is wrong.</p>
<span id="continue-reading"></span>
<p>But let's take a thing out of the way beforehand: I'm not saying debuggers are
<em>bad</em> you should never use them. Debuggers have their use, but every time I
had to use one, it was because there was something missing.</p>
<p>Most recently, using a framework in Java, I had problems with my code. I'd
expect it <a href="/books/things-i-learnt/crash-it">to crash</a> 'cause I didn't handle
things. What actually happened is that the framework silently hid the error
and restarted the processing. To find out what was happening, I had to attach
a debugger and see what was wrong with the data; otherwise, I'd have no idea
about what's wrong.</p>
<p>Was a debugger necessary there? I don't think so. If the framework actually
displayed the error (crashed, put a wall of text on the logs, whatever), I
wouldn't need to use a debugger. But, because something was missing, I did,
in fact, was <em>forced</em> to use a debugger.</p>
<p>Besides this, in the long run, you'd end up with problems in locations that
you can't attach a debugger -- for example, your production environment. You
<em>could</em> but you <em>shouldn't</em> do this. On the other hand, if you <a href="/books/things-i-learnt/log-events">log
events</a>, then you can see what was going
on, without a debugger.</p>
<p>Again, I'm not taking the merits of debuggers, but in the long run, they are
mostly useless and actually point missing surrounding support to actually
understand what's going on.</p>
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&lt;&lt; <a href="&#x2F;books&#x2F;things-i-learnt&#x2F;understand-shortcuts">Shortcuts Are Nice, But Only In The Short Run</a>
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<a href="&#x2F;books&#x2F;things-i-learnt&#x2F;users">Think About The Users</a> &gt;&gt;
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