That’s an interesting point about depending too heavily on a debugger. I haven’t run into anyone too dependent on it, but I could see that happening.
To me, debuggers offer a tighter dev loop when there’s something you’re stuck on. They also let you ‘grok’ a call stack in an unfamiliar codebase. “Did this function get called?” “What’s in this variable?” etc.
How do people do stuff without debuggers? :D
Another way to develop would be through iterating within a Unit Test that you don’t plan to keep around.
Uh, I set a breakpoint and run the app?
To add a bit more context, it’s more difficult to configure a debugger when the application is running within something like Docker. How difficult? That depends on the language and tools you’re using.
I’m a heavy intellij user, but the git log UI always confuses me. When I open ‘git log’ via the action menu IntelliJ doesn’t focus my current branch. I am not sure if there’s some other menu I’m supposed to use to achieve that.
I do use the commit local changes, pull changes, merge branches functionality a good bit. My only feedback there is that I haven’t found a way to quickly commit changes without running git hooks. Each time it requires me to open up the gear icon and deselect ‘git hooks’. This is slower than using the command line where I can write git commit --no-verify and repeat the same command again and again. I know it’s a niche need, but it’s necessary for testing a rather archaic system we maintain.
For my own projects I’m trying to build things I actually want. Tools for myself. But now the hard part becomes identifying a tool you wish you had, and scoping it down enough so that it’s appropriately sized for a new language. Tricky to approach the task from two ends.
I think it mainly comes down to the project landing page being more friendly and the UI being more polished.
The landing page of join-lemmy.org doesn’t show what the website looks like. The only screenshots are of code and github. That section is geared towards potential instance administrators, not potential users.
Interesting article, I don’t think I have a use for them though.