Does Your Debugger Sing to You?

ZahrGnosis writes "TRN Mag Online is carrying an article titled Programming tool makes bugs sing. '[The researchers] set up software that mapped pitch and melodic contour information to structural elements in the programming language Pascal. "[We] aimed to see if information about the structure of Pascal programs could be communicated using such musical phrases".' They even found a practical application for software debugging."

Comments

No, but I know a song about a debugger!

[Tackhead]

My debugger doesn't sing to me, but I know a guy who sang about a debugger I once used.

The UPS Debugger Song: "Just One More Hack (and then I'll put it on the 'net)

Lyrics: Just One More Hack

Well, I've written a debugger and it suits me just fine
it'll chase away your problems, turn your water into wine
it's got so many features, in fact it's bloody clever
if it can't solve your problem then your problem probably never
can be solved
so you might as well pack it on in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.

It's got everything you wanted, everything you desire
it'll handle fancy structures, set your soul on fire
it'll indirect through pointers, and catch a falling star
and if you ask it nicely it'll pop off to the bar
and tell your friends
how to solve the problems they're in,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been.

If you've got a nasty problem and your data structure's bent
and your pointer's in a tangle with your structure elements
if you're losing all your memory coz your allocator leaks
and your girl's getting nasty coz she's not seen you for weeks
then stoke up Mark's debugger
you know it'll win,
coz it's the best debugger that there's ever been....

- Burt MC Weadon (Mark Wheadon), from MUSENET '92

(Ah, thank you Google, for the historical reference to first puclication!) UPS - The Song!"

Sound is a great debug tool!

[CrazyBrett]

Back when I first started experimenting with full-screen graphics programming, I went through a phase where I could switch screen modes, but not get anything to show up. This meant that I had no way to print diagnostic messages to the screen to figure out when something went wrong. The solution was to play sounds to track the progress of the program and report error conditions.

"Oh, the program went Boink-Ding and Bloop, but not Clunk... that must mean that palette creation failed!"

The Past Revisited

[rawdot]

I don't have a reference to it, but I thought that Admiral Grace Hopper and her crowd had done something just like this generations ago simply by hooking up the accumulator of a Univac to a D/A converter, which in those days resulted in audible frequencies! A quick search on Google found something similar was done on a CDC 3300 (search for CDC 3300 in this page).

Cheers,
Richard

Bah! This is old-school!

[Anonymous Coward]

Programming by sound was something I always used to do on my Tandy 1000 8086 machine, running at a whopping "turbo" speed of 7.16 MHz.

I'd crank up my AM radio next to the machine, run my program, and I could hear each iteration of the loop, I/O requests, screen prints, BIOS calls, DOS calls -- they all had different rhythms and pitches.

Multi-format input is Good

[ewanrg]

I've noticed several folks who seem to think this is silly, dumb, etc. I don't think it is. Think back to the days (if you're old enough) of monochrome displays. Even the addition of a few colors made it easier to process information by taking advantage of human sensitivity to color in our environment. To say that music, or at least sound, could be incorporated makes sense to me.

Particularly in applications where you're trying to track status over time, having some background that varies with changes can be very helpful (I seem to recall the game Populous using this to good effect to help you get a quick idea of how you were doing overall). In the context of a debugger, having clashing noises that become more melodious as the program gets closer to completion and perhaps also asit comes closer to defined standards seems to bea good motivator.

Just my .0001 share of Berkshire Hathaway's Class B worth...

Back in the Old Days...

[dfung]

Hmmm...

Well the first computer I ever had free reign of was one of those Commodore Pet computers with the little tiny calculator keyboard. Little memory, little keyboard, no disk, and I still managed to learn a little assembler to pep up my BASIC programs.

When I came out to the Silicon Valley to go to college in 1978, I left the PET behind, but still checked out the computer shops when I had free time (anybody remember The Byte Shop in Palo Alto? Computerland in Los Altos?). One of the things that I found pretty entertaining at a Commodore shop was a guy that was debugging by putting a little AM radio next to the computer. If you tuned to the right frequency (and I'm embarassed that I don't remember it), you'd hear the sound of your code executing as static. If you had the right loop coded, you would hear a burst of static when it executed, and this guy would drop in the little flag routine as a debugging aid. By putting in a marker like that in the different long-running repetious sections,you could actually tell where your code was running, or if you were stuck in an infinite loop.

Kind of cool back then, although I have to admit that I don't remember writing anything that ever took 2 minutes to execute. Well, intentionally anyway...

David Fung

Everything old is new again

[Viadd]

Back in the Apple II/Commodore/Altair days, programmers (who else was there?) used to tune a radio to a dead band and place it by the computer as a debugging aid. You can tell a lot by listening to the EMI that a computer put out. Infinite loops caused a continuous tone, different stages of processing produced different characteristics in the static, etc.

There were also programs designed just to place music on the radio with their EMI.