[wingide-users] More Griping :-)

[Michael Foord]

Wingware Support wrote:
[snip..]
>
>> *However*, a substantial proportion of Python developers I know 
>> simply never (or rarely) use debuggers.
>
> Which always amazes me...
>
In the case of our project we already have an excellent debugging 
framework in place. This is 100% (pretty) unit test coverage - which is 
entirely geared around running small units of our code and investigating 
state.

For large and tangled applications (no offence intended or implied) I 
can understand the need to set breakpoints and crawl around with a 
debugger - for us the *need* to do this would indicate that something 
was wrong with our code.

We do *occasionally* have frustrating and hard to track down bugs (but I 
don't remember the last time this happened at work), but I don't believe 
that debuggers are a magic bullet. Difficult to reproduce bugs often 
mean that the state that *causes* the bug is hard to reproduce - once we 
have got that far then tracking down the problem is rarely far away.

Michael