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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Practically every time I do a 'console.log' to see the value of something in the current page state I actually wanted a 'debugger' statement instead. Pausing execution so I can look at other things around what I wanted to log often proves very useful and let's me get to the root cause of a problem faster.

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Are you lamenting that you reach for `console.log` first, instead of using the `debugger` statement, or are you wishing there was a `debugger` statement, because there absolutely is a `debugger` statement. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

I'm lamenting that I reach for console.log first and then regret it. Every single time.

Huh, why do you think you do that? Do you forget about the debugger statement, or is there some other reason you think console logging might work well?

Maybe my debugger skills aren't strong enough, but I find that when I'm trying to reason about how some complicated code is executing, a debugger statement forces me to wade through tons of internals in libraries I don't care about. Some well-placed console logs give me much less information overload.

The same here, also in my case at least 90% of the time when there is a problem I know where the problem is I just need to look at a couple things and confirm which of a couple scenarios could be causing the problem.

This is really missing at the moment.

I wish there was a "debugger snapshot" functionality that does not pause execution and creates a snapshot of the current DOM and state.

Probably a performance nightmare but being able to continue and inspect what happened in retrospect is what makes console.log a powerful debugging tool IMO.

You could extrapolate this to the time-traveling debuggers we've seen for Redux and other tools. That stuff is super powerful.

Interesting. I feel the opposite. Reading through multiple log lines somehow tells me something about the problem (program) that I don’t get when I use the debugger.

console.log(JSON.stringify(myValue, null, 2)) could be what you are looking for.

That's just a prettier console log. I almost always want to use the debugger.

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