Taking the Pain Out of Debugging With Live Programming

angry tapir writes "'Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place,' Brian Kernighan once wrote (adding: 'So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?') However, Sean McDirmid, a researcher at Microsoft, has been working to remove some of the pain from debugging. McDirmid, based at Microsoft Research Asia, has been studying ways of implementing usable live programming environments: a solution that is less intrusive than classical debuggers. The idea is to essentially provide a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously — and in the same interface as code editing — with tools to track the state of variables in a more or less live manner."

Re:Visual Studio

[progician]

You must be very unbiased guy in general. No MS partisanship, whatsoever.

While I agree that the MS Visual Studio is a good IDE over all, there are better alternatives out there. The first real problem with it is that it's single-platform. You can't use it anywhere.
The extensibility is a bitch in VS. It takes too much time and effort to figure out it's API, and it's quirks. Not to mention the support for these retarded languages that VS supports, apart from C++ and C#. That is the only two that worth even to look at.
The debugger is great... except that the whole IDE is based around their own debugger, and you making a debugging interface in VS takes more time than any other IDE out there.
Visual Studio also very rigid on your project structure, and if you don't subscribe to their project file model, you are basically screwed.
Not to mention, that Visual Studio is a resource hog only running on very beefy configuration. Oh, and don't get me started with the useless packages that installs on your system for no apparent reason. Finally, if you want to do refactoring, you have to purchase an external tools, like VAX.

So, while it has some good features for which MS deserves a candy, overall it isn't that good, no need for jumping up and down like a puppy dog.

they have a word for this

[waddgodd]

"a programming environment in which editing of code and the execution of code occur simultaneously" is commonly called an interpreter, welcome to 1975

Re:Wow

[Spudley]

Why is the computer industry hell bent on constantly reinventing the wheel?

Because the computer industry (and certainly the louder and more vocal parts of it) has a heavy bias of young excitable developers who are talented enough to create these things from scratch, and not experienced enough to think that others might have done similar things in the past.

Apple quote in article

[CODiNE]

What's funny about this article is it's focused on a very limited text based debugging system where the author is already apologizing for bugs while demo'ing it.

It mentions a quote from an Apple guy on the same topic. Wait a minute... Apple is working on this too? So you click the link and find a much better article with a similar system that's way more advanced and live connects the graphics with the code.

Just kind of sad, I RTFA and think "Huh, that's interesting, someday" then check out the link inside the article and find a much more informative and interesting story that I'm still reading. Read THAT article instead. Looking forward to seeing this creep into Xcode updates.

Re:Greenspun's Tenth Rule

[TheRaven64]

Smalltalk-80 (or even Smalltalk-76) is more akin to what they seem to be describing than most lisp implementations. In Smalltalk-80, you can inspect every object in the system, visually, including the objects that comprise the inspector for whatever you're looking at, and you can modify any value on the stack, at any depth, unwind it and so on.