Why aren't students taught to use a debugger? [closed]

Answer 1

A found that there is a lot of negative attitude towards debuggers amongst academia and seasoned systems programmers. I have come up against one quite talented programmer who claimed that "Debuggers don't work, i just use log files." Fair enough, for multi-threaded server apps you must have logging, but there's no denying a debugger is useful for 99% of the code that is not multi-threaded.

In answering your question, yes debuggers should be covered in programming syllabus, but as one of the tools of debugging a program. Tracing and logging are important as well.

Answer 2

This is a good question to ask to the faculty at your school.

At my university, they gave a very brief example of debugging, then pointed us to the "help" files and the books.

Perhaps they don't teach it because there is sooo much stuff to cover and so little time for the lecturers. The professors aren't going to hold everybody's hand.

Answer 3

In high school we were taught to debug by writing stuff out to the console.

In college, we were taught a mix of that plus using a debugger.

The tools have only gotten easier to use, so I am really not sure why it is not taught.

Answer 4

I'll put in a cautionary note on the other side. I learned to program with Visual Basic and Visual C ( mid 80s ), and the debuggers were built-in and easy to use. Too easy, in fact... I generally didn't think about how to solve a problem, I just ran it in the debugger and adjusted the behavior. Oh, that variable is one too high... I must have to subtract one here!

It wasn't until I switched to Linux, with the not-quite-as-easy gcc/gdb combo, that I began to appreciate design and thinking about your code first.

I'll admit, I probably go too far the other way now. I use a debugger to analyze stack traces and that's about it. There should be a middle ground between analyzing the problem and stepping through it in a debugger. Certainly people should be shown all the tools available too them.

Answer 5

The same reason students aren't taught version control, or unit testing, or shell scripting, or text editing, or documentation writing, or even (beyond intro courses) programming languages. The class is about computer science, usually a single concept or family of concepts, not programming. You're expected to learn what you need.

This isn't unique to computer science. My chemistry classes (I also have a chemistry degree) didn't teach me how to use any chemistry lab equipment, either. You learned that by hanging around in the lab and watching other students and asking the grizzled old profs who hung out there.

Answer 6

I don't think the problem is teaching. Using a modern graphical debugger is not rocket science (at least not for most user-mode programs running on a single computer). The problem is with the attitudes of some people. In order to use a debugger effectively, you should:

• Admit it's your fault and select isn't broken.
• Have the perseverance to spend a couple nights debugging, without forgetting the previous point.
• There's no specific algorithm to follow. You should guess educatedly and reason effectively from what you see.

Not many non-programmers have these attitudes. At college, I have seen many friends who give up after a relatively short period of time and bring me some code and tell me the computer is doing something wrong. I usually tell them I trust their computer more than them (and this hurts some feelings, but that's the way it is).