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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

They weren't ninjas, otherwise they would have used breakpoint actions for doing those print statements without modifying the source code.

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What's breakpoint action? Is it like inserting printf before breakpoint?

maybe this is sometimes called assert()? or in some debuggers you set a watch on a var and the BP triggers only on the watch-condition so the BP don't trigger each loop, only when x=7

Breaking is just the default behavior when a breakpoint is hit, you can generally attach whatever behavior / conditions you want using the debugger's scripting language.

Reading through the majority of this comment section, I get the impression that those who like print statements find value because they aren’t proficient with modern debuggers, rather than they find print statement valuable even though they’re proficient with debuggers.

I once saw an interview with Visual Studio members that one reason why they started doing talks about how to use the debugger was the continuous set of requests for features that Visual Studio does almost since it exists.

Same applies to other debuggers.

It is not only the debuggers, but also OS and language runtime tracing facilities like DTrace, eBPF, ETW, JFR, ....

Many devs aren't 10x because of QI, rather because they learn and make use of the tools available to increase knowledge about the platform.

Reminds me of this diagram http://i.imgur.com/ZOuf9hg.png (which I don't necessarily agree with)

I agree, but my feeling is, if one person is bad at using debuggers it is their fault. If (as it seems to me) most developers are bad at using debuggers, then it's probably to debugger's (and associated tooling's) fault.

For me it is the teacher's fault, given that a large majority never teaches anything related to debuggers.

So we get generations that use vim and Emacs like notepad, create Makefiles by copy-paste and barely know gdb beyond set breakpoint, run, step and continue.

Using C as example, but feel free to extrapolate to another language.

And no I am not exaggerating, this was the kind of students I would get into my lab when I spent a year as TA in 1999/2000, and naturally would have to get them up to speed into good programming practices.

It maps breakpoints to debugger actions that are triggered instead of actually stopping execution, like formatted output of whatever variables are in scope.

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