In Santa Barbara...
Debuggers...
Warning: the following will be relevant to software developers only. Ignore this post if you aren't one :)
I wish universities offered a required course on debuggers for those in Computer Science program, or at least made the use of the debugger a mandatory task in a heavy-programming course.
Debuggers are fairly simple to use, yet for some reason many programmers still rely on printf statements to do most of their debugging. I think that debuggers course would help students
appreciate debuggers. And, IMHO, that's the key - appeciating a debugger, and realizing that it's usually more efficient than using printfs ! Most students probably don't recognize true capabilities of a good debugger, and how much it can do for them. For example did you know that you can create a watch and have the debugger breakpoint when some variable attains a certain value, or that you can set a conditional breakpoint so that a debugger only breakpoints on a line if a certain conditi...
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