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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Stuck in the past?
Feed Title: Cincom Smalltalk Blog - Smalltalk with Rants
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Interesting justification for log4J over on the manual site for log4J - an old quote from Kernighan and Pike related to C level debugging:
As personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a stack trace or the value of a variable or two. One reason is that it is easy to get lost in details of complicated data structures and control flow; we find stepping through a program less productive than thinking harder and adding output statements and self-checking code at critical places. Clicking over statements takes longer than scanning the output of judiciously-placed displays. It takes less time to decide where to put print statements than to single-step to the critical section of code, even assuming we know where that is. More important, debugging statements stay with the program; debugging sessions are transient.
Now, logging is useful - I still do that with remote Smalltalk servers that have no UI from time to time. However, this makes it sound like logging is still preferred to debugging. Admittedly, the home site for a logging tool is going to be biased, but still... to my mind, logging is a poor substitute for using a debugger. Of course, a Smalltalk debuggeris actually a code browser with the context stack riding along, so YMMV - if your tools are primitive, maybe logging looks better...
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