JUNIT questions

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?=]

For exactly /one/ reason -- you used the phrase "a lot".

????

I give two very specific reasons for which I do not consider
debuggers practical in many cases.

And you post:

#If so, and at least if it's a development server, then there is
something /very
#seriously/ wrong with the debugging tools or development environment.

#I was under the impression that tools like Eclipse and Netbeans were
perfectly
#capable of debugging code running inside servers/app containers. Am I
wrong ?

And now you say that is because I indicated that it was a frequent
problem.

Whether it is a frequent problem or not does not excuse you from
completely ignore my specific reasons and invent one on my behalf
and explain why that is wrong !

Now, it may be that all you meant was that this happens often (considered in
the abstract) without making any claim that it happens often /in proportion/ to
other bugs. I.e. over a developer's lifetime he may see 1,000,000 bugs, of
which 10,000 are not approachable with a debugger (the numbers are, of course,
completely imaginary). In that case no one would deny that 10,000 bugs is "a
lot", but that number is small in relation to the overall number.

My impression is that you are making a stronger claim than that -- that a large
minority (at least) of bugs are not approachable with a debugger. And that
claim, whether or not you do in fact support it, is the one that I think is
false for more application domains. (The big counter-example is embedded
systems).

Sigh.

I even wrote where it is the case:

#In server based Java usage I would say it is a very common case.

Server based Java is probably like 80% of all Java. And in a huge
part of real world server based Java problems using a debugger
is hopeless.

That you also changed the above sentence from what I wrote to
something completely different that matched what you try to put
in my mouth:

#In server based Java usage I would say it [having no debugger] is a
#very common case.

is not what I would consider proper quote technique.

Maybe I have been misreading you, but you have seemed to me to be taking a
position something like "debuggers are too often useless, so don't encourage
people to use them". Whereas /my/ position was that people are avoiding using
debuggers when they should not (our of fear, laziness, predjudice,
unwillingness to learn something new, or because they work in an
poorly-designed development environment).

A debugger is an excellent tool for those learning Java.

It is even an excellent tool for relative easy real world problems.

It is not an effective tool for the most difficult real world
problems.

I will not say that people should not use debuggers. They should
use them if possible. They should just be aware of their practical
limitations.

Arne