First time I used a debugger last month and it felt like magic

I've been learning Python for about 3 months and kept getting lost in my loops and if statements. Last Tuesday I finally watched a youtube tutorial on using pdb to step through my code line by line. Has anyone else had that moment where a tool just clicked and made everything way easier to understand?

3 comments

3 Comments

faith68411d ago

You've got a point that watching a pro chef can feel like they're hiding something. But with coding tutorials, the person isn't a pro chef - they're usually just a regular dev who also messes up. The good tutorials show their mistakes and how they fix them. That's what made it click for me, seeing someone else's code break and then watching them backtrack. Real chefs don't show you their burnt pans, you know?

dakotawood11d ago

That's exactly how it works - once you see the machine stepping through its own logic, it demystifies the whole thing. Same reason why watching someone cook makes recipes way easier than reading them.

hannahk1911d ago

Hold on @dakotawood, wait. Did you just say watching someone cook makes recipes easier? Because I have burned water before, so I genuinely want to know what planet that works on. Watching a pro chef just makes me feel like I'm missing ten secret steps they aren't telling anyone about. I mean, they just toss stuff in a pan with no measuring cups and it comes out perfect every time. That's like saying watching a magician makes the trick easier to figure out. Maybe it's just me, but watching someone cook usually makes me feel way more lost, not less.