let’s not act like Java’s error log is useful
Super-advanced java devs like me do it like try{} catch (Exception e) { System.out.println("something went wrong"); e.printStackTrace(); }
you can follow any exception down to the exact line of code
Which is usually not a piece of code written by us and is caused by another piece of code not written by us either
Does your IDE not highlight the lines written by you in a different colour? Of course that doesn’t help when it’s an error in production!
but you can follow any exception down to the exact line of code (or JNI call, I guess) where the problem occurs.
But, it’s not really where the problem occurred. How often do you get a stack trace and the bug fix is at the line referenced by the stack trace? Almost never. It’s more that it takes you down to the exact line of code where the effects of the problem are bad enough to affect the running of the program. But, the actual problem happened earlier, sometimes much earlier.
For example, NullPointerException isn’t actually the problem, it’s a symptom of the problem. Something didn’t get initialized properly, and nobody noticed for a while, until we tried to use it, and got a null pointer. Sometimes it’s easy to go from the effect (null pointer) to the cause (uninitialized thing). But, other times that “thing” was passed in, so you have to work backwards to try to figure out where that thing comes from, and why it’s in that broken state.
Sure, it’s better than nothing, but it’s still frustrating.
I think it’s pretty useful, be interested to hear your hangups with it though because it’s definitely not perfect.
If something goes wrong and I have a stack trace, that plus the type of exception will almost always be enough for me to figure out what’s wrong at least as a starting point. I’ve worked mostly with JVM languages in my career though so maybe I just don’t know how bad it actually is.
The same applies to using the core dump.
In fact, the Python one is the lest useful of the trio.
