This blog is about anything technically opensource or copyleft-ed/ GPL-ed, obviously most of it Linux or connected to Linux in some way.

Wednesday, February 25, 2009

IDE and debuggers

Since the time I started programming, I've been using printfs for debugging. For some reason, I found it much easier, better and concrete overall compared to any tools. So my programming tools have almost always been vi and printfs. Of course, when I was forced into using Visual Studio, I did use the VS debugging tools, but they were limited only to looking up values in runtime than anything, something that you'd do with gdb or printfs. IDEs and debuggers do make life easier in the short run but they *help* build bad habits, quite similar to relying on word processors that correct your language even if you write syntactically incorrect stuff. A bad coder, similarly, tends to rely on IDEs to help the syntax and debuggers to assist fix an unthought piece of code already written!

Today, all that came back when I was looking up to tune the Ubuntu install to see what all I'm missing that I may use once in a while. Not that I'm doing any coding, but I began looking up IDEs that came up on Linux since Anjuta. Looks like KDevelop and Anjuta are still going good. Funnily enough that led me to some pros-and-cons debate of using IDE, which had a link to what Linus Torvalds feels about debuggers, more clearly kernel debuggers, aka "I'm a bas****" mail. :)

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