John Carmack: Best programming setup and IDE | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

Don't show the discussion to John Carmack. He's baffled why people are so allergic to debuggers: ▶ this video

John Carmack: It still boggles my mind how hostile to debuggers and IDEs Silicon Valley VC- backed companies are ▶ this video

Print debugging is a disaster. If there's one widespread practice among non-beginner developers that wastes hours of time it's print debugging. I honestly can't tell how often I have seen people, even experienced programmers (usually because they insist on running some bespoke vim setup) refuse to use a graphical debugger to actually step through a program, and instead they spend hours hunting down bugs they could have found in ten minutes. There's a section of an interview with John Carmack ( ▶ this video ) where he laments the same thing. It's what the Windows/game development corner of the programming world actually got right, people generally use effective tools for software development.

This was one of the more interesting parts of John Carmack's interview on Fridman's podcast: ▶ this video

vim bindings are worth learning, vim/nvim itself is not. Two reasons. One, graphical debugging. Almost every hardcore vim/nvim user I've met has terminal (no pun intended) printf-debugging disease, or uses an IDE on a second monitor. Carmack talked about it in an interview ( ▶ this video ) Secondly people, especially with neovim, seem to be hellbent on turning the thing into a GUI editor anyway, with bespoke search interfaces, file tree plugins, graphical plugin installers, and so on. At which point I don't understand why you're not using something made for that purpose rather than painfully try to reinvent it in a piece of software designed to output text

While we're appealing to authority, we should probably note that John Carmack has a pretty different opinion about debuggers: ▶ this video

Contrasting perspective from John Carmack [1] who drops into a debugger all the time to explore state, understand program behavior, debug things, etc. Looks like there is no universal golden path. Differing environments make different approaches effective. [1] ▶ this video

Thanks for your take. What do you think of John Carmack's[1] suggestion that using a debugger is the best way to program? I am by no means comparing myself to Carmack :-) I find debugger a good way to "see" what the program is doing. But that leads to a lot of time wasted. [1] ▶ this video