5 ms·

Optimistic to assume that modern day programmers even know what a debugger is, or if they do, consider it as anything else than some weird ancient shibboleth on

Optimistic to assume that modern day programmers even know what a debugger is, or if they do, consider it as anything else than some weird ancient shibboleth only used by the greybeards ;)

rafaelmn 6d ago
Debugger MCP better
- a012 6d ago
  It’s all /skills now
- josephg 6d ago
  But of a tangent but I think cognitive skills are starting to become like physical skills. If we don’t move our bodies, we waste away physically. If we don’t do hard cognitive work sometimes - like writing and debugging code - I worry our minds will atrophy. I don’t have a problem with cars. But walking is still good for us.
  - bluGill 6d ago
    Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything. I know a few people who blacksmith as a hobby (often for the physical exercise as much as the work), but most people are happy not knowing how to do that job. I know how to set the air-fuel ratio on a gas engine, but I'm glad I don't need to tweak those parameters while driving (unlike a 1910s car where you did), and I won't miss oil changes on my cars as I move to electric.
    - lelanthran 6d ago
      > Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything. Are you trying to be funny?
      - bluGill 6d ago
        Work should be worth. I'm not sure if that is me or autocorrect.
        lelanthran 6d ago
        It was unintentionally funny then :-) If I'd accidentally written a comment asking whether the intellectual skills I am losing are worth keeping, and make 2x spelling errors in a single short sentence, I'd find the unintended irony hilarious. (but that's me, maybe you don't find accidental errors that you make to sometimes be funny)
Levitating 6d ago
To be fair, even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I really only regularly used debuggers in C because it can't display arbitrary types in debug print statements.
- josephg 6d ago
  Debuggers still have their place in algorithm heavy work, or to pull apart heap dumps to try and figure out obscure bugs. Even LLMs use debuggers. I asked Claude to reverse engineer a closed source binary the other day. It used gdb to trace its behaviour. Didn’t even use ghidra.
- koyote 6d ago
  > even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I guess it depends on the bugs. LLMs even INSIDE the (VS) debugger couldn't work out some of the more recent bugs I have been looking at. Never mind by statically looking at the code base.
bluGill 6d ago
The greybeards rarely used debuggers, and then only to see the stack trace of a core file. They found printf better. I can't find my copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming but that is what I recall it says. Those authors are the best known greybeards.

Optimistic to assume that modern day programmers even know what a debugger is, or if they do, consider it as anything else than some weird ancient shibboleth only used by the greybeards ;)

rafaelmn 6d ago

Debugger MCP better

a012 6d ago
It’s all /skills now
josephg 6d ago
But of a tangent but I think cognitive skills are starting to become like physical skills. If we don’t move our bodies, we waste away physically. If we don’t do hard cognitive work sometimes - like writing and debugging code - I worry our minds will atrophy. I don’t have a problem with cars. But walking is still good for us.
- bluGill 6d ago
  Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything. I know a few people who blacksmith as a hobby (often for the physical exercise as much as the work), but most people are happy not knowing how to do that job. I know how to set the air-fuel ratio on a gas engine, but I'm glad I don't need to tweak those parameters while driving (unlike a 1910s car where you did), and I won't miss oil changes on my cars as I move to electric.
  - lelanthran 6d ago
    > Try, but what skills are work keeping? We need something cogntive, but not everything. Are you trying to be funny?
    - bluGill 6d ago
      Work should be worth. I'm not sure if that is me or autocorrect.
      - lelanthran 6d ago
        It was unintentionally funny then :-) If I'd accidentally written a comment asking whether the intellectual skills I am losing are worth keeping, and make 2x spelling errors in a single short sentence, I'd find the unintended irony hilarious. (but that's me, maybe you don't find accidental errors that you make to sometimes be funny)

Levitating 6d ago

To be fair, even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I really only regularly used debuggers in C because it can't display arbitrary types in debug print statements.

josephg 6d ago
Debuggers still have their place in algorithm heavy work, or to pull apart heap dumps to try and figure out obscure bugs. Even LLMs use debuggers. I asked Claude to reverse engineer a closed source binary the other day. It used gdb to trace its behaviour. Didn’t even use ghidra.
koyote 6d ago
> even before LLMs could spot my bugs in an instant I guess it depends on the bugs. LLMs even INSIDE the (VS) debugger couldn't work out some of the more recent bugs I have been looking at. Never mind by statically looking at the code base.

bluGill 6d ago

The greybeards rarely used debuggers, and then only to see the stack trace of a core file. They found printf better. I can't find my copy of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Practice_of_Programming but that is what I recall it says. Those authors are the best known greybeards.