this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2023
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Debuggers allow you to step through code and inspect the program state at any moment during execution. You can even sometimes run commands inline to see how stuff reacts.
This means you can usually just hover a variable or something in your IDE while execution is paused and see its current value without having to restart execution every time you want to print something different.
It's honestly not a bad way to write some of the more complex lines of code too. In python/vscode(ium), you can set a breakpoint where you're writing your code and then write the next line in the watches section. That way you can essentially see a live version of the result you're getting. I especially like this for stuff like list comprehension, or indexing logic where you might normally expect a possible off by one or key error.