Comment Must be nice (Score 2, Interesting) 731
It must be nice to be one of you folks who work on one of those projects where you can just use your brain to understand all the relationships among data structures and various pieces of code or where you can make sure that you only ever work on code where you can be sure that it's structured cleanly with nice small functions that can be tested individually.
Out here on the wild frontier we're stuck working on code that was written many many years ago by people who weren't quite so clever as the average slashdot poster. These people left behind badly structured code with inelegant data structures and comments that don't accurately describe how the code works. This code consists of several tens of thousands of lines in the component I'm directly involved with and several hundreds of thousands of lines in the larger project.
So while it sure would be swell if all the functions were small, the data structures elegant, the code tidy, and the comments accurate, that's just not the way it is for many of us.
And it pains me to say, but much of the debugging we do is done using printf() because most debuggers are such unredeemable sacks of $#!].
I do much of my debugging using msdev from VC++ v6, and I find it to be even less useful than the CodeView debugger that I used in 1987. There's a few things that are better but there are a lot of things that are worse. How can I get msdev v6 to show some of my variables in hex and some in decimal? Is this such an esoteric request that the developers at MS couldn't be expected to anticipate it?
The number of things that the MS debugger can't do that I could do in 1992 using IBM's VisualAge C++ debugger is even longer. Is this progress?
Out here on the wild frontier we're stuck working on code that was written many many years ago by people who weren't quite so clever as the average slashdot poster. These people left behind badly structured code with inelegant data structures and comments that don't accurately describe how the code works. This code consists of several tens of thousands of lines in the component I'm directly involved with and several hundreds of thousands of lines in the larger project.
So while it sure would be swell if all the functions were small, the data structures elegant, the code tidy, and the comments accurate, that's just not the way it is for many of us.
And it pains me to say, but much of the debugging we do is done using printf() because most debuggers are such unredeemable sacks of $#!].
I do much of my debugging using msdev from VC++ v6, and I find it to be even less useful than the CodeView debugger that I used in 1987. There's a few things that are better but there are a lot of things that are worse. How can I get msdev v6 to show some of my variables in hex and some in decimal? Is this such an esoteric request that the developers at MS couldn't be expected to anticipate it?
The number of things that the MS debugger can't do that I could do in 1992 using IBM's VisualAge C++ debugger is even longer. Is this progress?
