cognitive psychology. PhD 
A debugger is not a debugger, it is an interactive program executor. The sooner we internalize this, the sooner we can talk about what should really be considered a “debugger.”
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A person debugging a program is a debugger. They use many tools to understand program behavior, such as an interactive program executor or program state displayer (printf). Which raises the question — how useful is interactive execution to understanding behavior?
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Or differently: what other kinds of tools help debug / understand programs? Whyline showed that another framing is *automatic reduction of context*. Tools that can interactively eliminate regions of code unrelated to the bug. (Good idea, let’s do more of that!)
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Interactive execution with "good" controls might help validate assumptions about program behavior quicker, or at one's own pace. Reminded me of this:https://twitter.com/redblobgames/status/1383497820657700868?s=20 …
0:14I thought I knew how some code in my project should work; implemented an interactive diagram to find the constants. Implementing it showed me I didn't really know how it worked.
I've learned so much by making interactive versions of things over the years https://observablehq.com/@redblobgames/biarc-path-on-grid … pic.twitter.com/lSmoq9b7N7Show this threadThanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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