<story><title>“I think the vast majority of developers still debug using print() statements”</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1532448988766650385</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sph</author><text>I used to debug frequently when I coded on Win32 GUIs 20 years ago and running the debugger was as simple as pressing F5 instead of F9. Nowadays, with a multitude of languages, setups and editors, I don&amp;#x27;t even bother. Even setting up JS debugging under VSCode, which supposedly is a core feature, has always been an exercise in frustration every time I&amp;#x27;ve tried it.&lt;p&gt;Rarely I run gdb when I&amp;#x27;m debugging a particularly hairy C issue, but with any other language I don&amp;#x27;t even bother and add prints everywhere. The JS &amp;quot;debugger&amp;quot; statement is pretty useful, but it&amp;#x27;s still very awkward compared to the golden standard of Microsoft IDEs from two decades ago.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t blame the users, blame the tooling, editor and language developers that never cared for delivering a good debugging experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>akrymski</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard to imagine that 20 years ago Delphi and Visual Basic had far superior IDEs and debugging experience running on my 100 MHz IBM PC with 512MB of RAM.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not sure where the ecosystem went wrong, but it&amp;#x27;s strangely related to the web.</text></comment>
<story><title>“I think the vast majority of developers still debug using print() statements”</title><url>https://twitter.com/paulg/status/1532448988766650385</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>sph</author><text>I used to debug frequently when I coded on Win32 GUIs 20 years ago and running the debugger was as simple as pressing F5 instead of F9. Nowadays, with a multitude of languages, setups and editors, I don&amp;#x27;t even bother. Even setting up JS debugging under VSCode, which supposedly is a core feature, has always been an exercise in frustration every time I&amp;#x27;ve tried it.&lt;p&gt;Rarely I run gdb when I&amp;#x27;m debugging a particularly hairy C issue, but with any other language I don&amp;#x27;t even bother and add prints everywhere. The JS &amp;quot;debugger&amp;quot; statement is pretty useful, but it&amp;#x27;s still very awkward compared to the golden standard of Microsoft IDEs from two decades ago.&lt;p&gt;Don&amp;#x27;t blame the users, blame the tooling, editor and language developers that never cared for delivering a good debugging experience.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>kristopolous</author><text>JavaScript&amp;#x27;s remote debugging protocol is a total game changer. Highly recommend looking into it.&lt;p&gt;And yes you can use it on frontend stuff if you invoke your browser correctly&lt;p&gt;And yes you can use it to debug mobile through chrome&amp;#x27;s inspect feature. And yes you can proxy that to use it in your editor of choice and yes GUD with emacs is supported&lt;p&gt;And yes the &amp;quot;debugger&amp;quot; keyword correctly triggers the breakpoint through this entire pipeline. It&amp;#x27;s borderline magic</text></comment>