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John Carmack: Best programming setup and IDE | Lex Fridman Podcast Clips

Lex Clips1 HN recommenders · 2022–2025
960K views · podcast · evergreen · Uploaded 2022-08-06

A clip of John Carmack on the Lex Fridman podcast discussing his programming setup, why he favors debuggers and IDEs, and his puzzlement at developers who avoid them.

HN debugger-versus-print-debugging threads point to it as Carmack's authoritative case for using a real debugger.

Testing, debugging & developer toolsTech pioneers & interviews

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8 comments from Hacker News

@systemvoltage2022 · in “Tell HN: I was tired of being a perfectionist so I built an app within 24 hours”

Thanks for your take. What do you think of John Carmack's[1] suggestion that using a debugger is the best way to program? I am by no means comparing myself to Carmack :-) I find debugger a good way to "see" what the program is doing. But that leads to a lot of time wasted. [1] [VIDEO]

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@heinrichhartman2023 · in “What a good debugger can do”

Contrasting perspective from John Carmack [1] who drops into a debugger all the time to explore state, understand program behavior, debug things, etc. Looks like there is no universal golden path. Differing environments make different approaches effective. [1] [VIDEO]

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@simscitizen2023 · in “I do not use a debugger (2016)”

While we're appealing to authority, we should probably note that John Carmack has a pretty different opinion about debuggers: [VIDEO]

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@Barrin922023 · in “Ask HN: Is (n)vim worth the trouble?”

vim bindings are worth learning, vim/nvim itself is not. Two reasons. One, graphical debugging. Almost every hardcore vim/nvim user I've met has terminal (no pun intended) printf-debugging disease, or uses an IDE on a second monitor. Carmack talked about it in an interview ( [VIDEO] ) Secondly people, especially with neovim, seem to be hellbent on turning the thing into a GUI editor anyway, with bespoke search interfaces, file tree plugins, graphical plugin installers, and so on. At which point I don't understand why you're not using something made for that purpose rather than painfully try to reinvent it in a piece of software designed to output text

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@pengaru2024 · in “When I got started I debugged using printf() today I debug with print()”

This was one of the more interesting parts of John Carmack's interview on Fridman's podcast: [VIDEO]

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@Barrin922024 · in “Don’t look down on print debugging”

Print debugging is a disaster. If there's one widespread practice among non-beginner developers that wastes hours of time it's print debugging. I honestly can't tell how often I have seen people, even experienced programmers (usually because they insist on running some bespoke vim setup) refuse to use a graphical debugger to actually step through a program, and instead they spend hours hunting down bugs they could have found in ten minutes. There's a section of an interview with John Carmack ( [VIDEO] ) where he laments the same thing. It's what the Windows/game development corner of the programming world actually got right, people generally use effective tools for software development.

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@troupo2024 · in “Demystifying Debuggers, Part 2: The Anatomy of a Running Program”

John Carmack: It still boggles my mind how hostile to debuggers and IDEs Silicon Valley VC- backed companies are [VIDEO]

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@troupo2025 · in “Things you can do with a debugger but not with print debugging”

Don't show the discussion to John Carmack. He's baffled why people are so allergic to debuggers: [VIDEO]

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