Ask HN: Easiest Language to Debug In?
Experienced engineers out there: what has been the easiest language for you to debug? What tools/IDEs have made it this way?
The open source world has a hard time making visual debuggers that work. gdb has always been workable as a command line debugger and if you like gdb then great. (there was that time I had to debug a Java/C++ program with Eclipse and GDB simultaneously and it was easy after I turned off the segfault trap because Java segfaults all the time.)
A few weeks ago somebody posted a review on HN by someone who tried looking at open source visual debuggers (DDD for instance) and came to the conclusion that they were all broken and the people involved weren't interested in fixing them.
Visual debugging with Eclipse/Java works fine, but I wouldn't count on Eclipse working 100% right for something other than Java. I prefer the Jetbrains tools and find visual debugging to work just fine in in IntelliJ (Java), PyCharm (Python) and Javascript (WebStorm). I'd expect the Jetbrains tools to work as advertised for other languages, and I know Visual Studio works well for languages that Microsoft cares about.
Thus it is a matter of the the quality of the tools you are using.
For a long time I've meditated on the bad state of GUI applications, expecially open source GUI application. A technical cause that's become increasingly clear to me is that conventional UI toolkits of all kinds are not really encapsulated for this reason: drawing is done signal threaded and the framework can't abort a render method so any GUI component can prevent the other components from rendering by blocking in the render method. Then you get that spinning beach ball or equivalent. Put enough plugins in Eclipse and give it a large enough project to work on and it's almost inevitable that somebody used an O(N^2) algorithm in a render method somewhere and it will die from Pluginitis.
There's also the social reason that many open source advocates think that any open source product is better than any closed source product (like that old bit about "any white man") so they can't admit that Visual Studio's debugger works and DDD doesn't.
(Open source nerds stormed the barricades in Germany to get local governments to use off-brand Office suites and the employee's unions had to fight back for the right to use an Office product which is buggy but orders of magnitude less buggy than competitors)