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Comment by imron | Hacker News Reader

> Try debugging without breakpoints

Why would you need to give this up? I use breakpoints with terminal debuggers all the time.

Yea this take makes no sense. What in the world is wrong with debugging with breakpoints?

It is for many problems, especially concurrency related ones, much less powerful than trace points. But the issue I have seen is that some tools like gdb have unergonomic support for tracing so there I tend to use break points or printf debugging just because the tracing support is so bad in gdb.

It’s a particular subcategory of cork sniffing where you pick the hardest, dumbest way to do things because you’re a Real Developer

There is a good argument for never using debuggers except for core development- Once finished your logs/metrics/events should be good enough to understand what is happening in an application. If debugging your application requires breakpoints you wont really be able to debug a live instance, and wont be able to easily signal off what is happening in the future.

That is a reasonable argument - but it was not made in the article and also does not preclude the use of breakpoints (see your except clause which covers a lot of ground).

It actually said

> Debug your code without visual breakpoints

With ‘visual’ being the important aspect.

There's another section below your quote where the author also wrote:

  The Challenge
  [...]
  3. Try debugging without breakpoints

The alternative to breakpoints is to study the output logs. He wrote:

  Real Growth Requires Discomfort
  [...]
  Debug using logs and terminal output

Fair, I didn’t read that far as I got bored of the “thou shalt” nature of the thing.

Tbh it's the default way I start my app in, debug mode xD

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