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Comment by derefr | Hacker News Reader

Naively, there's nothing forcing these developers to chase that leak into the night, rather than into the next work-day.

But I do wonder whether some languages have debugging problems that require "keeping more state" to solve them than others, such that the developers doing debugging in those languages would rather forge ahead and finish, than drop it and pick it back up the next day. That'd be an interesting thing to measure.

It'd also be interesting if some languages attract certain developers, because the attention-span and "mental stack size" the language designers assumed for the language, feel better suited to them. Maybe there are languages better for people who can juggle many or few facts at once; languages better for people who can hold three screens of text in their head, or who prefer to only have to think about one line at a time; etc?

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There's definitely the overhead in re-loading where you were yesterday, although sometimes that's handy - "sleeping on it" does work.

I find (in any work, not just the rare C work) that when I get into a juicy problem I just don't want to stop. It's nothing to do with the task switching / reload cost, it's that I'm interested in what I'm doing.

So I think you're right that it's about what kind of developers a language attracts, but not because it effects the language designers. I think it has something to do with the languages used by people along the "programming is a job" - "code is life" spectrum. Look at Haskell's bump. AFAIK, Haskell is only used by people for whom code is a way of life.

(This is not an endorsement or indictment of either end of that spectrum. Some people who paint are workers, others are craftsmen, others are artists. All use paint.)

I started leaving my laptop hibernated with visual studio or gdb stuck at the break point where I was off. The feature to anottate variables and pin them also helps for when somebody bothers you mid debug session.

Good point, but I meant mental re-loading.

"Some people who paint are workers, others are craftsmen, others are artists. All use paint."

That sounds so profound. Did you just make that up, or is it a old paint industry koan?

I can't tell if this is wonderfully worded ("sounds so profound" compared to actually being profound) and understated sarcasm or if you are serious?

> But I do wonder whether some languages have debugging problems that require "keeping more state" to solve them than others, such that the developers doing debugging in those languages would rather forge ahead and finish, than drop it and pick it back up the next day.

I used to stay late at work sometimes for this reason - not more than an hour or so but I found that even when I stayed late I often didn't manage to solve the issue that day - instead I came in the next morning fresh and was able to solve it better after having slept on it.

Now, that's true of debugging in my experience, but if you're knocking something out quick and don't want to have to get back into that groove the next day, it's a different story.

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