Category: Activities

This morning at work, I’m forcibly reminded of the other thing I like about Eclipse. Debugging. I had a guy come to me asking why this value wasn’t set at a certain part of the code, and so I put a breakpoint on it, attached to the running process with the Eclipse debugger, forced a schedule change, and when it hit the breakpoint, was able to single step through. I found the problem much quicker than if I’d had to keep adding “System.out.println” statements until I’d narrowed down the problem, like I would have in the past.

For 25+ years I’ve been debugging programs with print statements, core dumps (remember //SYSABEND SYSOUT=A?) and writing out the value of variables on a printout of the source code. Every now and then I’d step through something in dbx or gdb, but that was the exception rather than the rule. Now I can step through the code in the same editor I modify the source in, and actually fix it right then and there. I wonder why it’s taken me so long to discover this?

It’s now been 250 days since I started using Eclipse, first for a demo I was doing with GWT, and then for day to day programming. Yes, I’d used it a few times in the past, but I’d never stuck with it and gone back to vi/vim/gvim and ctags soon afterwards. I’ve got to say, I’m surprised. After 20 years of using vi, and having my fingers well trained for those particular commands, I can’t believe how much I’ve come to like and rely on Eclipse.
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