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1 point by akkartik 4603 days ago | link | parent

"I'd say Arc is a demonstration of this option."

You don't hear people say of Arc, "it worked the first time I wrote it." That's more Haskell's claim to fame.

The dichotomy I'm drawing isn't (in this case) about how much you empower the user but how you view debugging as an activity. I claim that Haskellers would like you to reason through the correctness of a program before it ever runs. They consider debugging to be waste. I consider it to be an essential part of the workflow.

The points on the state space that you enumerate are totally valid; I was just thinking at a coarser granularity. All your options with the word 'debug' (at least) belong in my second category.

Perhaps what's confusing is the word 'debugging' with all its negative connotations. I should say instead, relying on watching the program run while you build vs relying just on abstract pre-runtime properties. It's the old philosophical dichotomy of finding truth by reason vs the senses.