<story><title>Things I Don’t Know as of 2018</title><url>https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>watermelon59</author><text>Not exactly that, but when reading Coders at Work I was surprised to learn that a lot of big names in our field use &amp;quot;printf debugging&amp;quot; and don&amp;#x27;t like actual debugging tools.&lt;p&gt;Made me feel less bad about it :)</text></item><item><author>nemo1618</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to see lists like this from more high-profile programmers. What does John Carmack not know? What does Dan Bernstein not know? What does Bryan Cantrill not know?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>wbsun</author><text>As a distributed software developer, I have found debuggers less useful these days. If I need a debugger, it probably means I don&amp;#x27;t really know the code that I am working on.&lt;p&gt;Good IDEs with good static analysis, good unit test&amp;#x2F;integration test&amp;#x2F;e2e test coverage, a true understanding of the code base before changing it, all these avoid most bugs.&lt;p&gt;When the production hits a bug, good monitoring and logging can help root-causing. It is extremely difficult to debug and reproduce a bug in a distributed environment. Many bugs I have root-caused are purely based on monitoring and logging then show the proof with mind-execution of the code.</text></comment>
<story><title>Things I Don’t Know as of 2018</title><url>https://overreacted.io/things-i-dont-know-as-of-2018/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>watermelon59</author><text>Not exactly that, but when reading Coders at Work I was surprised to learn that a lot of big names in our field use &amp;quot;printf debugging&amp;quot; and don&amp;#x27;t like actual debugging tools.&lt;p&gt;Made me feel less bad about it :)</text></item><item><author>nemo1618</author><text>I&amp;#x27;d love to see lists like this from more high-profile programmers. What does John Carmack not know? What does Dan Bernstein not know? What does Bryan Cantrill not know?</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>enriquto</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s not only a matter of usage.  Many good programmers will argue that &amp;quot;actual debugging tools&amp;quot; are mostly useless and that logging the execution of your program is a more productive use of your time.  In some sense, time spent inside the debugger is lost forever.  On the other hand, the time spend writing good logging code is really worth, and will be especially helpful to detect future bugs that you have not yet written.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not a good programmer, but I can say very proudly that I&amp;#x27;ve never used any debugger (except for assembly language, where the debugger is more like an interactive shell).</text></comment>