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Comment by jcroll | Hacker News Reader

I come from the php world now coding in python. There used to be a very nice library from Symfony called VarDumper: https://symfony.com/doc/current/components/var_dumper.html that would just pretty print variables you dumped to the browser in an easy to consume form. Is there anything like this in python?

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There is pretty-print [0], which you could dump inside pre tags, or print to stdout. But honestly, depending on the framework, quicker options exist than (basically) printf debugging.

[0] https://docs.python.org/3/library/pprint.html#example

For Flask what would be the better option?

Pretty much the stuff already mentioned elsewhere on HN for this article. I often find Werkzeug's excellent debugger is enough: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19718869 . pdb/ipdb/pudb et al (pick your fav) can help for really tricky stuff. And sufficient logging, so you know what's going on at all times even without a debugger attached.

(occasionally, the low effort of print-debugging works, but if you keep having to print in more/different locations... it's a blunt tool IMO)

I try to have "debug calls" that I can call from the browser or Postman or Swagger, etc. and return all sorts of debug information, etc.

I have the impression that local program-specific debugging tools quickly evolve into something like functional tests that uncover issues that functional tests proper might not cover. For example, if I'm serving a ML model but I have a debug call that runs sanity checks on the data that are too expensive to run each time.

I think there is a difference because python doesnt require a web browser to run. People are just running programs with no web UI or webserver etc... If you really wanted, you could pipe your debug prints to a file and load in a browser if that is what you want :p

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