On Wed, June 1, 2005 2:55 pm, Tom Dimock said: > I still make very little use of debuggers to this day, and > find the younger programmers completely mystified as to how I ever > get code to work.
I frequently get the same reaction... I rarely use a debugger either, yet I seem to have very little trouble tracking down problems. In fact, I dare say I am a more efficient bug hunter than many people I know who DO use them. I don't bemoan anyone using a debugger by the way, or any other advanced tool. Maybe at one point I would have, but no longer. I realize that each person works at peak efficiency in their own way, with their own preferred tools. That's one of the reasons I am a big believer in not forcing any given IDE on anyone and in fact I'll buy my guys virtually any tool they tell me they need (as long as they are convincing!)... especially in the Java world where it's relatively simple to make applications agnostic about development environments (except for those damned Websphere-specific files!), let each work in the way they are most comfortable and will be most efficient. As long as it all boils down to an Ant script and each can reproduce a build in their environment, I'm cool with it. For me, it's UltraEdit and a command line, for some it's WSAD or Eclipse or IntelliJ or whatever else. Here's a cool story (which illustrates just how pitiful my life is, but I digress)... back in high school one day a fellow student came to me... he was taking a Pascal class (yes, my school actually had Fortran, COBOL and Pascal classes!)... he was having endless trouble getting a program of his to work. He showed me the listing, and it took me about 10 minutes of looking at it, just reading the code, but I finally pointed out the problem. I don't remember exactly what the problem was, but it wasn't a simple syntactic error, it was a logic/flow issue. The thing is, I had never to that point even SEEN Pascal code! But, I knew enough about the structure of programming languages in general and about program construction in general and about logic in general that I could figure it out. <sarcasm>Now bow before me!</sarcasm> Frank --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
