[wingide-users] Word completion and refactoring support

[Michael Foord]

Geoff Bache wrote:
> Martijn Pieters wrote:
>> On 3. jul. 2007, at 22.13, Geoff Bache wrote:
>>> (3) Reading the list of feature additions in Wing 3.0 made it seem 
>>> to me like the bulk of the effort is being put into improving the
>>> debugger. To me this seems a shame when more and more people are 
>>> moving away from using debuggers towards driving development
>>> with tests. Personally I would far rather spend my time writing 
>>> automated tests or improving system logging than running a debugger: 
>>> these things
>>> stay with the system, whereas debugging sessions are transient. My 
>>> debugging session now is not going to help any other developer of 
>>> the system,
>>> nor is it going to help me a few months from now.
>>
>> I am one of those people writing more and more automated tests, but 
>> that hasn't diminished the need for a good debugger for me. In any 
>> complex system, you'll find that the best way to solve a bug is still 
>> using the debugger, as you may not have anticipated the situation 
>> with tests. You may even be able to reproduce the bug with a 
>> testcase, but that doesn't mean you know how to solve it. :)
>>
>> Martijn Pieters
>>
>>
> That's where logging comes in. I can do no more than repeat the 
> oft-quoted Kernighan and Pike. Put the last line of this quote into 
> Google and you'll find Kernighan, Pike and I are not alone in these 
> views :)

Plus Guido van Rossum:

http://panela.blog-city.com/a_talk_by_guido_van_rossum.htm

    Guido uses print statements for 90% of his debugging and a debugger 
for the times when his brain
     stops working or he has to debug some wierd code that someone else 
wrote.

At Resolver we use debuggers (the .NET one) *occasionally* - when we 
have an unexplained crash and want to attach to the running process and 
see what is going on. Not very often though.

We find a comprehensive unit test suite much more useful.

Michael Foord
http://www.voidspace.org.uk/ironpython/index.shtml