Anyone reading the title of this post might question my sanity. To preempt any rumors: as far as I know, it’s perfectly fine.
So how did I come up with this title? Well, it’s not mine, but rather from a post on a well-known German developer news platform, and it surprised me quite a bit. The subtitle surprised me even more, if that was even possible: “Systematic thinking beats tools.”
The combination of title and subtitle sounds as if you can only have one (debugger/tools) or the other (systematic thinking). As if these two topics are mutually exclusive.
I can’t confirm that from my own experience. That’s probably why I had those vague feelings in my stomach. They certainly weren’t from hunger, but because a statement about my own work methods just didn’t fit. These are usually the exciting moments when you can broaden or change your perspective on the world — or, after careful consideration, decide against it.
I would never dream of doing without the debugger in the ABAP Development Tools or the SAP GUI. It was the debugger, among other things, that drew me to SAP and ABAP in the early 2000s with its simple yet context-sensitive “/h” command. I hadn’t seen anything like it before, at least not with that level of elegance.
At this point, I’d like to thank the creators of the ABAP debugger once again. They saved themselves and many others countless hours in the world’s least enjoyable game show called “Guess the Solution to Your IT Problem — With Little to No Information.”
This brings us back to why my stomach rebelled at the title and subtitle. I’m all about numbers, data, and facts. The debugger is a tool for collecting precisely that and supporting my systematic thinking.
If you have a hypothesis, you have to prove or disprove it. Perhaps my university studies are showing through here. Alternatively, we could attribute it to my age, because at over 40, I have neither the desire nor the time to forgo numbers, data, and facts and spend hours playing guessing games. Incidentally, that sometimes costs someone money. So, I prefer a more methodical, goal-oriented approach, using the available tools, like the debugger.
One final note. I can only speak from my experience with ABAP development here, not for other programming languages and their ecosystems. Things might be different there. At least the author of the original article didn’t refer to ABAP and also explained their reasons, including “setup effort is too high” and “debugging changes the timing behavior during application execution”. In this context, that might be true, but I can’t judge it.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed the post, please share the article with your community. Thanks in advance.
Michael (a mind forever voyaging)