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."

Comments

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

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.