> <grin> Avoid debuggers like a plague. If someone applies for a job > with us and starts talking about their proficiency in > debuggers, the interview stops right there and we keep looking.
grin noted but seriously, why? I tend to take the opposite approach. A good understanding of debuggers and how to use them will speed up the productivity of any developer, often by a factor of two or three - much faster to set a breakpoint and watch than to create multiple print statements and then take them all out again after laboriously peering at lots of data. OTOH much faster to insert one or two well chosen print statements and find the bug rather than crank up a debugger. But if you need more than a couple of prints then its probably faster to import pdb... And of course scriptable debuggers are a great testing tool! What has gotten debuggers a bad name is the trend with modern graphical debuggers to just blindly step through the code line by line. Now that is seriously inefficient! Its one reason I tend to use raw text debuggers like gdb or dbx rather than the GUI variants - the te,mptattion to laziness is avoided. Alan g. _______________________________________________ Tutor maillist - Tutor@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/tutor
