How to Debug Chez Scheme Programs (2002)

> The inspector is menu driven, and you can always see the available options by typing "?." For the most part, the options are self-explanatory.

I've enjoyed using Chez Scheme a lot, but I never could get my head around its built-in debugger. I never remember where to go to just view a stack trace, and if I do find it, I end up confused when I try to navigate around it.

I suspect all the information I could possibly want is in there, but I don't find the interface at all intuitive.

Lisp tooling is the weirdest of all. On one hand, it allows full introspection and reflection on all internal state. On the other hand, it is almost as clunky as GDB command line. Why is there no visual debugger?

Sometimes I think Emacs was the worst thing to happen to Lisp. It put the language in a "Worse-is-better" box and left it there.

Racket has a very nice built-in debugger in its DrRacket editor, with thread visuals and all. Too bad nobody uses DrRacket, or Racket anymore. Admittedly, even with the best debugger, finding the cause of runtime errors has always been a pain. Hence everybody's moving towards statically compiled, strongly typed languages.