After yet another homework question on SO. It seems like that vast majority of students have no idea what a debugger is or how to use one. I feel that knowing how to use a debugger is almost as important as other fundamental of programming.
It's not so much the case that the use of debuggers that needs to be taught, but the more general techniques of debugging. This would include teaching how to use a debugger of course but would also various other important techniques, e.g.
As an additional benefit, many of the techniques can also be applied to problem-solving in areas other than programming.
There's quite a good book on this whole subject, which should probably be required reading for all undergraduates and anyone learning the basics of programming: Debugging by David J Agans.
Tertiary computer science courses are tailored towards teaching students programming fundamentals, as you've mentioned - these concepts are taught to the students in hope that they would grok the necessary concepts and apply it to a wider range of programming languages and problem sets.
Debugging tools, on the other hand, are a subset in the implementation area - each tool is different for each language (even though the concepts are the same). We were exposed to debugging tools but never really covered them in depth. If we spent more than a week on debugging tools, I would look back - in hindsight - and deem that a waste of time. I'd rather learn about BigO notation or polymorphism. However, ff the power of a debugging tool has not been (successfully) conveyed to the students, then that would be an absent necessity.
In most introductory programming courses program state is simple enough that you can weed out any bugs with a few print statements. There also might be the issue of forcing students to do things by hand so they get a sense of how and where in the code certain types of bugs occur. If you have no idea where to look then a debugger is going to be pretty useless.
grep does the job. No stepping, no conditional breakpoints - just grep.
It's not so important. I almost never use one, and never have. The best way to debug code is:
And for much modern, multi-threaded software, debuggers have the effect of hiding bugs rather than uncovering them. And they should definitely not be "taught" at degree level, any more than one would teach how to use a word processor.
Debugging should be taught because students are humans and humans make all kinds of mistakes, some of which require acquiring some experimental data (debugging info) before any enlightenment regarding a given mistake occurs.
Debugging isn't taught because of the premise (maybe inherited from math department) that programs should be correct by design, perhaps even provably so. And thus students shouldn't be "experimenting" with programming correctly. However this ignores the real world manufacturing process of imperfect humans cranking out software to changing specs under schedule pressures & etc.
This question is foreign to me. At my university the use of the debugger (JDB and the Eclipse debugger) were taught as early as the first-year computer science sequence. The use of debuggers and other testing tools were taught again in the course on software testing.
I personally find it incredibly difficult to believe that any good school that is attempting to prepare people for entry into the workforce isn't teaching about proper debugging and testing techniques. They obviously can't cover all aspects of it, but they can at least teach the basics in the classroom.
Figure it out on your own
I didn't need and didn't want a professor or T.A. to take time teaching me something I could easily figure out on my own. They are there to teach me the hard concepts and guide learning. They aren't and should not be there so you don't have to RTFM.
Learn How To Learn
College should be about learning how to learn, not just having your hand held through every topic you don't know. If you have your hand held constantly through this process you will fail miserably in the real world.
Uphill, Both Ways, Through the Snow
When I went to school they didn't bother to teach you the language either. You were expected to pick it up on your own time. They would give you the project and facilities. It was up to you to track down the information you needed in order to complete the implementation and submit a working program. Pretty similar to the real world, except with office hours.
