• Murdo Maclachlan@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Image Transcription: YouTube Comment


    @davidm.313

    “Debugging. The game where you are the criminal, the victim, and the detective at the same time. But you probably don’t know where the crime took place, or what it was. But there definitely is a crime.”


    I am a human who transcribes posts to improve accessibility on Lemmy. Transcriptions help people who use screen readers or other assistive technology to use the site. For more information, see here.

    • Zacryon@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      The fact that it runs means that it has something delinquent to it. Otherwise it wouldn’t run. Better run after it and catch it. /j

      (That was a bad pun and I am not sorry. It’s 3 am here and I can’t sleep. This helped me to burn a minute. Thank you.)

    • odium@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      The worst is when you’re print statements aren’t outputting where you expected them to, and you have no idea where they’re outputting to.

      • Redkey@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        I tought myself programming as a kid in the 80s and 90s, and just got used to diagnostic print statements because it was the first thing that occurred to me and I had no (advanced) books, mentors, teachers, or Internet to tell me any different.

        Then in university one of my lecturers insisted that diagnostic prints are completely unreliable and that we must always use a debugger. He may have overstated the case, but I saw that he had a point when I started working on the university’s time-sharing mainframe systems and found my work constantly being preempted and moved around in memory in the middle of critical sections. Diagnostic prints would disappear, or worse, appear where, in theory, they shouldn’t be able to, and they would come and go like a restless summer breeze. But for as much as that lecturer banged on about debuggers, he hardly taught us anything about how to use them, and they confused the hell out of me, so I made it through the rest of my degree without using debuggers except for one part of one subject (the “learn about debuggers” part).

        Over 20 years later, after a little professional work and a lot of personal projects and making things for other non-coding jobs I’ve had, I still haven’t really used debuggers much. But lately I’ve been forcing myself to use them sometimes, partly to help me pick apart quirks in external libraries that I’m linking, and partly because I’d like to start using superscalar instructions and threading in my programs, and I remember how that sort of thing screwed up my diagnostic prints in university.

      • embed_me@programming.dev
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        1 year ago

        Even worse is when print statements cause the bug…

        That was me before discovering interrupt safe print functions.

  • Surp@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    You could technically do this just like how GTA Vs gameplay was with all the different characters.