>However, the fact that Linus Torvalds, who is in charge of a critical piece of our infrastructure made of 15 million lines of code (the Linux kernel), does not use a debugger tells us something about debuggers
It tells us that its possible to program without a debugger It tells us absolutely nothing about the utility of doing so because anecdotal preference cannot possibly reveal this.
> Will your debugger scale to hundreds of processors and terabytes of data, with trillions of closely related instructions? I’d rather not take the risk.
Almost nothing almost anyone is working on needs to work on TB of data across hundreds of processors to reveal a logic error or in fact at all.
The article could profitably be shortened to "I feel like debuggers are a bad investment of my time because I would prefer to spend that time revising and writing tests because my mental model of the tech I work with is sufficiently good that I rarely need to poke the code manually and I have confused my own preference and circumstances with universal truth because that's what humans do"
It tells us that its possible to program without a debugger It tells us absolutely nothing about the utility of doing so because anecdotal preference cannot possibly reveal this.
> Will your debugger scale to hundreds of processors and terabytes of data, with trillions of closely related instructions? I’d rather not take the risk.
Almost nothing almost anyone is working on needs to work on TB of data across hundreds of processors to reveal a logic error or in fact at all.
The article could profitably be shortened to "I feel like debuggers are a bad investment of my time because I would prefer to spend that time revising and writing tests because my mental model of the tech I work with is sufficiently good that I rarely need to poke the code manually and I have confused my own preference and circumstances with universal truth because that's what humans do"