Re: Any research putting c above ada?

["Nick Roberts" <Nick.Roberts@dial.pipex.com>]

David Hanley <david@nospan.netright.com> wrote in article
<3357C6C5.27F@nospan.netright.com>...
[...]
> 	I also think that debuggers are bad, but not that hey should 'never'
> use used.  I think that they are hardly ever necessary if the code is
> properly designed.  Either the bug will not occur, or it will obviously
> be in module 'x'  function 'y' because of the resultant incorrect
> behaviour.
> 
> 	You mileage may vary, of course.  
> 
[...]
> 	True.  My objection is that many programmers use the debugger to watch
> what their code is doing as a replacement for understanding it.  


My own feeling, observing (quite a number of) other programmers learning to
program, is that a good (and it is extremely important that it is good)
symbolic debugger can aid the learning process tremendously, because it
illuminates what is really going on as a result of the source code written.
Of course, students who don't understand the underlying machine
architecture very well tend to get confused. But then, they tend to make
very little progress anyway, until they start learning about how computers
really work (i.e. machine code).

Many highly experienced, and truly productive, programmers I have worked
with swear by debuggers, and would be lost without them. Personally, I
never use a debugger, in any language. I actually find them more trouble
than they're worth. Instead, I usually (almost subconsciously) insert
debugging code into the source code, in the (always correct) anticipation
that it will be needed. It gets excised when it is no longer needed. I have
written some truly big software this way, so I think that proves, well
enough, that debuggers do not _have_ to be used.

On the other hand, I don't think a sensible compiler vendor would even
dream of attempting to market a product (Ada or other) which didn't have
debugging facilities. I think it would be wrong to do so, anyway: as I have
said, there are some excellent programmers out there to whom a debugger is
as mother's milk. It seems to me that this emphasises a great truism that
programming is still (and will be for a long time to come) an essentially
_human_ activity. We all know how different people tend to be: it would
surely be surprising if it were not the case that different programmers
tend to have radically different approaches to the art of programming.

Nick.