Subj : Re: Not debugging?
To   : comp.programming,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.lisp
From : Russell Shaw
Date : Thu Aug 25 2005 03:57 am

Phlip wrote:
> Tim X wrote:
> 
>>I'm guessing he was referring to the irritating development of
>>programmers who are not able to debug code without a high level IDE
>>which includes a debugger which allows them to step/trace through the
>>code one line at a time and watch what happens to variables in a watch
>>window.
> 
> No. I'm talking about developers who don't write unit tests as they write 
> code. These provide the option of using Undo, instead of debugging, when the 
> tests fail unexpectedly.
> 
> This leads to a development cycle with highly bug-resistant code, and 
> without proactive debugging to implement new functions.
> 
> Yes, you still need the debugger - typically for legacy situations - and you 
> still need elaborate debugging skills. New code stays ahead of them.
> 
> The idea that we can implement without debugging is incomprehensible to most 
> programmers. But that really is what I meant.

You can only write tests before the code if you are very familiar with what
you want and have thought about it for hours/days/weeks. In the process of
making the solution of a very tedious problem clear to me, i can do a *lot* of
throwing away of code and refactoring for weeks at a time. The amount of extra
churn from rewriting unit tests would be hopeless. Refactoring of code *is* my
thought process. Write code that works, then write unit tests to make sure it
keeps working. Gdb/ddd is indispensible.

.