HACKER Q&A
📣 ohjeez

What debugging technique did it take you too long to learn?


What debugging technique did it take you too long to learn?


  👤 Jtsummers Accepted Answer ✓
In Common Lisp: How to really use the debugger. I knew how to read the error messages and clean up my code, but it took me way too long to learn how to restart from that point instead of starting the whole thing over again.

In C (embedded): How to use gdb over JTAG. No one else had set it up, and the errors were too hard to diagnose just by gathering traces.

In concurrent/distributed code: General problem, not language specific, how to use tools like TLA+ or Alloy to model the system and identify errors that were hard to replicate live.


👤 logicslave
To just try things out instead of thinking, watch and see what happens rather than parse all of the code in your head. Maybe I'm just intellectually lazy though