I’ve always thought a good debugger can be useful and sometimes invaluable. I spent a couple of hours today looking for a way to debug vim scripts and Winpdb is exactly what I wanted.

It became clear on my travels through the web lots of people need a debugger for vim/python too. I added a little summary to the embedded documentation page. Hope you think its a useful inclusion but cast you eye over it if you get a chance to make sure it all seems sensible to use.

Thanks for Winpdb!

Peter.

you write:
….just as I neglect writing unit tests because I have a useful debugger at hand.

Unit tests serve another purpose: With Unit tests you define and document the interface of your functions/modules/classes with the utmost rigor.

This allows you to do refactoring with the proof that your interface is not broken afterwards. So they help you to keep your builds clean.

You certainly don’t want to do that interactively in a debugger.

Debuggers and Unit Tests are completely separate tools with different uses.

Norbert

I’ve been developing professionally for 22 years and though I’m still learning new stuff all the time, in my opinion a good debugger is invaluable. Ever since I first started debugging C code on Vax/VMS systems, and then onto TurboC, Visual Studio and now Python WingIDE / WinPDB I never understood my fellow developers who didn’t take the time to learn how to make good use of a debugger IDE. Right now the guys I work with seem to prefer putting print statements in their code and looking at tracebacks rather than use WingIDE or WinPDB. WinPDB is ENORMOUSLY useful for debugging remote projects, and far easier to set up than doing remote debugging with WingIDE. Just the concepts of being able to single step through your code, and set breakpoints is INCREDIBLY powerful. If you’re doing anything complex at all, I personally can’t understand NOT using a debugger, and WinPDB is a great one.

Doug

The WingIDE debugger is excellent. Second best only to Winpdb

Winpdb used to work on Mac and possibly still does, but I have not tested it for a while on that system.

Giles Bowkett is not alone. It seems many people do not consider debuggers useful or needed, even in C. In fact, Linus Torvalds has an interesting opinion against the inclusion of a kernel debugger in the Linux development environment:
http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Kernel/linus-im-a-bastard-speech.html

As for Python and Ruby, it is possible that the culture of discouraging the use of debuggers was driven by lack of a good debugger in the first place, just as I neglect writing unit tests because I have a useful debugger at hand.

Without diving into anecdotal examples, I frequently run into complex problems where a debugger proves indispensable, either when debugging Winpdb itself or other people’s code.