Writing a C Compiler: Build a Real Programming Language from Scratch

i think that's true! but i don't think it's purely a matter of preference; it's also a matter of what the ecosystems support well and what you're trying to achieve. lisp is a huge exception to the rule about fp programmers; lisp systems, even including emacs, have extremely strong debugging support. but non-lisp fp languages tend to heavily emphasize static typing, thinking things through ahead of time, and correctness by construction, which reduce the need for debugging. but those are more valuable for writing compilers than for writing games or uis in general, where it's hard to define what counts as 'correct' ahead of time but easy to recognize it when you test it interactively

webdev of course has the problem that you can't stop your http response handler while the browser is waiting for a response. and, often, it's sadly not very concerned with ux. and it's often concerned with operating systems in a way where you have to debug problems after they occur, in part because of the scale of the problems

automated testing is another ecosystem thing that reduces the need for debuggers; to a significant extent it competes with static typing

one of the things i really appreciate about godot is being able to continuously adjust parameters and observe variables in my games as they're running. godot is motherfucking awesome, man. i definitely don't have a distaste for graphical debugging and development environments!

> breakpoints also provide stack traces, so they provide a kind of history as well. I'd rather inspect and interact with a program than dig through thousands of lines of logs (...) print debugging is tedious and requires restarting the program from the beginning whenever you make a change to the source

oh, see, i have programs like grep and emacs that dig through thousands of lines of logs for me. often when i'm debugging from logs i don't run the program at all; i just look at the logs and the source code. sometimes the program is running someplace i can't interact with it—memorably, on some occasions, on a satellite out of range of the groundstation. and usually exceptions on python or java give me a pretty decent stack trace, though other log messages unfortunately don't

there's another ecosystem support issue here—although i've sometimes developed on systems that supported fix-and-continue (cmucl, gforth, squeak, basic-80, godot), python and gcc support it very poorly or not at all. so for me i have to restart the program from the beginning whenever i make a change to the source in any case, whether i'm doing printf debugging or not. godot, again, is a very nice exception to this rule, and incidentally lets me add print debugging to the game while it's running

one of the great things about a breakpoint debugger, from my point of view, is that it makes it possible to add logging after the fact to a running program without editing the source or restarting it

i really appreciate you sharing your experience!

Is duck typing the pseudo-unsafe alternative? (Not unsafe as in accessing unsafe memory, but as in throwing exceptions if the duck-typed function doesn’t exist on the current type)

Can C handle both?

Coming from a static type system like rust and c#, i’m doing alot of “if this is a duck, duck.quack()” and i’m looking for faster alternatives and less verbosity if possible