Comment by taeric
2 months ago
I think the 1980s probably had higher debugger use than today. :)
I was specifically thinking of things like Cloudflare Functions and AWS Lambda, for the deployments that you can't really step debug. They both have ways, nowadays; but nothing that would let you do a hot patch to fix anything.
Granted, my example of senior engineers would be odd there. They definitely were deploying code as standard jar files to machines. Not sure why they didn't know of this. Even the more complicated war files were straight forward to connect to.
Further granted that this isn't something you could realistically do to a fleet of machines. Guessing that is why they didn't ever try to use it.
Depends, Azure definitely has the integrations needed for modern debugging.
With application insights and event tracing, that can be event plugged and debugged postmortem on Visual Studio.
Java world has similar ways with JMX, Visual VM and JFR.
Another great one on part with these two for distributed computing are Erlang based systems.
Finally we have language agnostic ways to do similar workflows based on open telemetry, even if code reload is not part of it.
Step debugging is the hello world version of how to use a debugger.
Agreed that step debugging is the hello world, but I still think it is a better development tool than it is a bug finder.
I'd love to start celebrating more use of these, if you have recommended articles to spread exposure to.