Beautiful Debugging

[[deleted user]]

I think that taking this qualitative divide-and-conquer debugging technique and building a tool around it is very clever. Even though the tool, in the end, did not have the practical impact that the author hoped, I think the process of creating it uncovered many interesting things about program and fix construction.

Building debuggers is one of those under-appreciated monster software engineering feats. I was shocked by the 600 KLOC number for GDB (without any GUI support)! I do wish, though, that someone would figure out how to build one that would display arbitrary classes in a readable format without resorting to me to write a custom data formatter!

[Erik]

I enjoy debugging. It has a feeling of "who done it". I like thinking about the puzzle and trying to diagnose the problem by its behavior. That may be analogous to what medical doctors do.

Debugging is a "zero value add" activity, so obviously I want to debug as little as possible.

Section 28.4, "Finding the Failure Cause Automatically", seems to have some conceptual overlap with the "Beautiful Tests" chapter earlier in this book.