http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=48599


in reply to Re: Are debuggers good?
in thread How to debug unknown dynamic code?

Two Whoops for this. I've never found the debugger to be remotely useful. The pain of using it outweighs the value. I use the debugger to understand behavior of code or algos, I use prints or warn logging to find bugs when I'm too lazy to refactor the code that got out of hand.

About half the time, I just rewrite the section in multiple pieces and the bug "goes away". Heck, I rarely open the debugger on _C_ code unless I need to find out what was on the stack at a core. Perl is ever so much better than that, I just can't imagine that it is very useful.

Update I wouldn't go so far as to say that gdb rocks my world but it has sure made working with big bad C quite a bit easier. Still, I usually don't pick it up will there is a nasty problem.

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