PythonLabs Team Moves to Digital Creations

[Joshua Macy]

"Thaddeus L. Olczyk" wrote:
> Ok. But debuggers should be. They are an important tool that
> determines the productivity of programmers.
> An IDE where you can make minor changes and then debug
> are important. ( Note generic tangent comming up.)
> Being able to see the value of variables as you step through code is
> too. As well as specifiying commandline arguments
> to the debugged script ( as well as evaluating scripts ).


  I used to think that before I started using Python, Tim Peters'
Doctest module, and some of the ideas about test-first programming and
refactoring from the Extreme Programming movement.  I'm sure that in
some cases it's still helpful, but I actually can't remember the last
time it took me more than a couple minutes to track down a bug, without
even touching a debugger.  Once in a while, I do have to put a print
statement in the middle of something and a debugger could save me
that--generally, though, treating code that's so complex that I really
need a debugger as needing refactoring until it's once again simple
enough that doctest is sufficient has done more for my productivity (as
measured by code that really works rather than lines I've pounded out)
than the most whiz-bang IDE I've ever used.

  Joshua