Re: Debugger Rant (was Re: How to debug an Ada program)

[Dmitry A. Kazakov <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2003 13:26:19 +0000 (UTC), Preben Randhol
<randhol+abuse@pvv.org> wrote:

>I don't say you shouldn't use a debugger, of course not, but what most
>people point out is that you don't need it so much as a common bug
>hunting tool as you do need in more weakly typed languages.

I think that a good visual debugger (in a good IDE) is essential to
make Ada popular. There always could be semantic bugs, which no
language can catch, and no programmer can avoid. But more important is
that to become popular means that Ada would be used by masses of
*uexperienced* [and even uneducated (:-))] users. One cannot expect
them writting bug-free algorithms or much thinking about what their
program is supposed to do. I wonder if popularity of a language is
directly reflected by the overal percentage of bad code written in the
language. The higher is the percentage, the more popular is the
language. And what does one with bad code? Debug it!

---
Regards,
Dmitry Kazakov
www.dmitry-kazakov.de