Ten years into casual programming and I still don’t know how to use a debugger.
Watch a Video or read something because it really is an invaluable tool. But here’s a crash course:
Debuggers, or IDEs, let you step through your code in slo-mo so you can see what is happening.
- Set a breakpoint - Click to the left of a line of code so a red dot appears. Run your program, and the IDE will execute to that line, then pause.
- Look at variables’ values - While the execution is paused you can hover over variables before that line to see their value.
- Step through the code - See what happens next in slo-mo.
- Use “Step Into” to enter into a function and see what that code does.
- Use “Step Over” to not go into a function and continue in the current spot after the function has done its business.
- Use “Step Out” to exit a function and pick up the execution after it has run. Use this when you’re in too deep and the code stops making sense.
- See whats in the heap - The heap will list all the functions that you’re currently inside of. You can jump to any of those points by clicking them.
- Set a watch - Keep a variable in the watch so you can see what its value is at all times.
- Set a condition on the breakpoint - If the breakpoint is inside a big loop, you can right-click on the red dot to create a conditional breakpoint, so you write something like x===3 and it will only pause when x is 3.
There are many other things an IDE can do to help you, so def look into it more if you want to save yourself a lot of insanity. But this is a good starting point.
If you’re developing for the web use F12 to open web tools, and when an error happens, click the file/line number to see that point in the Sources tab, and you can debug there.
That sounds really cool
Thank you for writing this out
It’s easy, you just step, step, step, step in, or wait, over, or, oops.
The only real time I use a debugger is to tell me what line a default occured at.
I believe in a conspiracy theory that nobody uses debuggers.
I can record a video tomorrow if it helps?
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Grep log will outlive us all
I work with 20 year old legacy spaghetti code, the debugger has become one of my most treasured tools.
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console.logcounts as “a debugger”, right?Yes, but only because it gives you a link to where that was run. Click the link to the right with filename:lineNumber, and it will open the sources tab to that line. Set a breakpoint and rerun to pause there, then step through the code’s execution.
Of course, if you’re using minified or processed code, this will be more difficult, in that case figure out how to do it in VS Code.
It does for me!
After decades of print debugging I finally got dap up and running in vim. It is very nice. Would recommend.
Does this include C programmers? I’ve definitely found GDB to be indispensable in the past (or maybe that’s what they would want you to think).
I use them daily. It makes it so much easier to work with an existing code base
Yep. Once you get the hang of it, you will cringe to think of all the wasted effort that came before. But getting the hang of it takes dedication.
Thankfully I use python mostly and pycharm makes it easy-ish to get the debugger hooked up to a project. But learning that process definitely took a few days
It can be useful sometimes. Same for print. And logfiles.
Ok, so, I thought I was crazy when I said “debug it” and my coworkers were like “you can read that shit?”
My colleague literally once said to me “i can’t read bleep bloops”
Heck I remember when you had to read “bleep bloops”. POST codes came in beeps, and that’s how you knew why the computer wouldn’t start.
Sometimes I miss em, wish it gave those in addition to the modern indicators. Then I could just tell without even looking.
Do modern PCs even support IBM-style speakers any more?
My b350 board supported that style of speaker. Newer machines apparently use the start button led in some cases.
Yes. My latest mobo has the pins for a POST speaker, but didn’t actually come with one. Installed it though and it works.
Now I’m wondering if my board supports one. I think it’d be cool if my big fancy custom cooling loop gaming build sounded like it’s from the early 90s.
Most boards still do. I have a couple x570 boards lying around that do, and my friend just got an x670e board that has one. They all have the setting in the BIOS for the POST beep as well, and you can set it up in your OS to beep at a specific frequency/duration for notifications.
Some motherboards have a tiny piezoelectric speaker soldered on, which replaced the larger speakers that used to be used. It’s becoming less and less common though.
My current mobo has LED post codes.
I hate it with a passion. The manual doesn’t list that the CPU led and MEM led are lit when the +5V rail is too low from too much load on it from the USB devices.
though thinking about it I should probably figure out WHY that’s a problem
Yeah the LEDs can be confusing. I like the fancy systems that have an eight-segment LED display (those basic ones that can show numbers and some letters) that show an error code. My work PC (a Lenovo ThinkStation) has the error code display on the front of the PC so you don’t even have to open it to determine the issue.
It’s still fun to enter competition even if these OP people are in it.
I have worked with most of these people at one point or another. I used to sit next to an old architect like walters. He had so many patents the company only recognize him on every 10th one.
I can really emphasise with Samir. Working in healthcare I’m basically limited to just the Office applications. However in the past few years I’ve been able to cook up solutions by reading / writing to file based databases, and using VBA to generate and bind to HTML contents on the fly for the built in IE11 instance. It’s as close to getting to some kind of web-stack within the confines of IT Sec in healthcare.
Working in healthcare I’m basically limited…
Here I was expecting you to start talking about MUMPS.
This is interesting, can you tell us more about how this is done?
For the backend I used the ADO library to create a MSAccess DB on a shared network folder. Then it’s a matter of using VBA to generate SQL commands to same library to read / write records from the DB.
For the frontend, I use VBA to generate a HTML document from the fetched data. For the IE control in a user form, you can then write the HTML to it. During this process you can bind local VBA variables to any of the html elements in the page.
A common flow would be:
- User clicks an element in a table
- simple JS on the page does some calculation, stores a value in a hidden input and clicks it.
- the user form variable detects the click in the monitored element, reads the changes, and acts on it.
I also have VBScript to act as the launcher by copying the excel file to the local machine, and launching the local copy. This solves the concurrency issue.
Just a heads up, I think the word you’re looking for is empathize.
I love this!
Don’t forget the programming socks trans girl programmer
Probably tye second one tbh
I thought that’s what the second last one was gonna be
Nah that one seems more like a femboy, since they’re using he/him pronouns.
I meant before I read the content, just based off image
It could also be the first/second one.
Good my colleagues think I am Hackerman that can hack through time!
Dude, literally me. Whenever my friends or my brother’s friend come to my room, I opened up a few terminals with only one of them is actually for coding and they thoight I could hack someone’s Facebook account or something LMAO.
Yes I live in Southeast Asia
Kung Fury will never not be amazing
That image goes so incredibly hard
As someone with ADHD I am a mix of hackerman and tharg. Unfortunately the Adderall just makes me barely function and Ive never actually hacked anything
What is this meme about? “Competition”, “Leaderboard”, “Waiting for the timer to hit 0:00”? I am so confused.
It’s about the feeling when people are a milion times more skilled in your field
Competitive programming.
Usually multiple algorithmic problems that are released to public at the same time and the fastest people to submit a correct solution get more points.
A fun one I still like to participate in is advent of code, which is a yearly christmas themed one with two problems released a day during advent.
If you want to seriously compete in competitive programming, you need to learn and memorize different problem types and the solutions to those. A bit like you start learning patterns in chess.
For practicing, the CSES Problem Set is a gold mine for practice problems. Theres also a list of competitive programming books on the site.
That sounds exhausting. Maybe I am showing my age, but after 15 years as a software developer (now DevOps engineer) I feel absolutely no desire to spend my free time competing against others. Maybe I would’ve felt different about this back in the days.
That being said, this meme still applies to regular software developers. I know plenty of people who match each of the shown stereotypes.
Advent of Code is fun even without seriously competing (which, at least globally or in bigger communities is basically impossible unless you’re actually a proper competitive programmer). There’s no stakes and you can just do the challenges you feel like doing :)
It’s about coding competitions, and without me being directly involved in the scene (the closest I get to it are silly competitions regarding indy-games or decompiling old games or whatever) I did make personal acquaintance with every of those stereotypes, and it’s so true.
It’s about how I applied to an associate engineer position, made it through 3 rounds of interviews, then got rejected only to find out they hired a senior engineer with over a decade of experience at AWS. /rant
XHTML 1.1 is much more elegant than HTML 2
Only noobs reveal their cards at competitions. 😈
Having participated in CTF competitions this is very accurate.
this is gold lmao
lololol attacked again
