The thing I hate in the software industry is that everyone believes there is only one way to do things and it’s their way and that their way is the best.

That's kind of weird to share keyboard with someone living hundreds or thousands miles away, but who am i to judge.

The difference is, you are a Webdev, Carmack is a real programmer...

100% agree on the logging part. I am an avid debugging user and I never understood why people locally debugged with logs instead of debuggers. However since I've moved to a company that handles highly distributed systems at large scale I completely understand the sentiment that writing great logs is crutial to understand what the heck is happening on production systems.

As Brian Kernighan put it: “Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

I loved how called out Prime felt immediately when Carmack talked about IDEs. I haven't laughed so fully in years, thanks for sharing this moment!

2:42

The thing where he was talking about people being anti-debugger wasn't actually really a server vs local code thing. It's a linux kernel developer thing. There is a bunch of famous "debuggers are useless and don't help you" when it comes to kernel developers, partially because the very nature of debugging could eliminate race conditions and the like that were causes your errors in the first place. But I'm going to go hard with Carmack on this one. Step debugging is so useful for going into a massive engine and understanding it.

It's AMAZING how few people, in general, know how to use debuggers and profilers.

I am a heavy user of the debugger, and I really liked your take about the fact that logging is a meaningful skill that might save your life once in production. I never thought of it this way, so I love the take ! Though, I think it's not a valid point for offline application -like games-, in the case of john carmack. And also, I think the debugger as JC says is just a really great way to go step by step through your code and inspect the way everything behaves, and catch falty stuff before actually faulty stuff even happen.

Can listen to Carmack talk about games and dev for hours. I really miss his quake con keynotes.

Always a joy to listen to the legend speak. I've watched the whole over-5-hour podcast (I highly recommend it), but that reaction was great. Thanks, Prime.

Neither do I, Vim users are like Arch Linux users. They spend half their life configuring it and the other half re-configuring it.

ThePrimeagen aka VimExpert uses a mouse to pause and play the video rather than a keyboard, and he doesn't stop there-any regular user may pause and play a video by dragging the mouse pointer to any location on the screen, but ThePrimeagen drag the cursor to the play icon in the corner !

Also let's not forget that there was an era in Windows where we had to interface with proprietary third-party components (and for just games, for everything). Using assembly-level debuggers was the way to go and it was a great way to understand low-level details of the underlying system (how the loader works, what the kernel does when it initializes threads, APCs etc). Then you also had to go through memory dumps from customers, which were usually compiled with a high amount of optimizations, so you had to use a debugger to figure out what was wrong (considering that quite a few bugs could smash your stack, even a stacktrace could have been unreliable)

I can somehow imagine Carmack talking that fast normally, while simultaneously typing assembly code at the same speed.

Observability (tracing, logs and metrics) are really important for running in production, but good debuggers are really useful for development. Use both.

This is totally gonna be the year of "Debugger-driven development". I can feel it in my bones!

I've been making a pretty complex game for months now, and I always used logs to debug, but I finally hit this point where the complexity is so high, I finally cracked open the debugger for the first time. And my god, I don't know how I would have solved some of these bugs without it. Mind you, they weren't systemically bad bugs, they were just a wrong variable name somewhere that I missed, or the wrong method being called that I forgot to change during a refactor, etc. It would have taken ages for me to find these things without the debugger. Of course there are also bugs that are much easier to solve with logs. I think both are incredibly useful, I use them both now. Being able to see the call stack and all variables while you go line by line is so useful.

I played the shareware version of the original Doom on my uncle's PC just after I left high school in 93. Since then I've played every version of Doom on PC, PS1 and N64. They are easily my most played games of all time and I still play the original Doom games with mods using gzdoom.