I think I need to unpack what I mean by 'really fails' to capture what I was trying to convey. I deal with Python programs running in a number of different environments, and there are some where literally all you have on hand are the libs you brought with you. Maybe that is an oversight on my part, but the reality is that in many cases this means that I am just going to restart the daemon and hope the problem goes away, I don't have the time to manually instrument the system to see what was going on. I shudder to imagine having to debug a failure from some insane pip freeze running on a Windows system with the runtime packaged along with it.
Worst case for CL means that at the very least I don't have to wonder if gdb is installed on the system. It provides a level of assurance and certainty that vastly simplifies the decision making around what to do when something goes wrong.
To be entirely fair, the introduction of breakpoint in 3.7 has simplified my life immensely -- unless I run into a system still on 3.6. Oops! I use pudb with that, and the number of uncovered, insane, and broken edge cases when using it on random systems running in different contexts is one of the reasons I am starting no new projects in Python. When I want to debug a problem that occurred in a subprocess (because the gil actually is a good thing) there is a certain perverse absurdity of watching your keyboard inputs go to a random stdin so that you cant even C-d out of your situation. Should I ever be in this situation? Well the analogy is trying to use a hammer to pound in nailgun nails and discovering that doing such a thing opens a portal to the realm of eternal screaming -- a + b = pick you favorite extremely nonlinear unexpected process that is most definitely not addition. You can do lots of amazing things in Python, but you do them at your own peril. (Disclosure: see some of my old posts for similar rants.)
Worst case for CL means that at the very least I don't have to wonder if gdb is installed on the system. It provides a level of assurance and certainty that vastly simplifies the decision making around what to do when something goes wrong.
To be entirely fair, the introduction of breakpoint in 3.7 has simplified my life immensely -- unless I run into a system still on 3.6. Oops! I use pudb with that, and the number of uncovered, insane, and broken edge cases when using it on random systems running in different contexts is one of the reasons I am starting no new projects in Python. When I want to debug a problem that occurred in a subprocess (because the gil actually is a good thing) there is a certain perverse absurdity of watching your keyboard inputs go to a random stdin so that you cant even C-d out of your situation. Should I ever be in this situation? Well the analogy is trying to use a hammer to pound in nailgun nails and discovering that doing such a thing opens a portal to the realm of eternal screaming -- a + b = pick you favorite extremely nonlinear unexpected process that is most definitely not addition. You can do lots of amazing things in Python, but you do them at your own peril. (Disclosure: see some of my old posts for similar rants.)