Hacker News

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-67657-w

It made program execution feel visible: stacks, data, and control flow were all there at once. You could really “see” what the program was doing.

At the same time, it’s clearly a product of a different era:

– single-process

– mostly synchronous code

– no real notion of concurrency or async

– dated UI and interaction model

Today we debug very different systems: multithreaded code, async runtimes, long-running services, distributed components.

Yet most debuggers still feel conceptually close to GDB + stepping, just wrapped in a nicer UI.

I’m curious how others think about this:

– what ideas from DDD (or similar old tools) are still valuable?

– what would a “modern DDD” need to handle today’s software?

– do you think interactive debugging is still the right abstraction at all?

I’m asking mostly from a design perspective — I’ve been experimenting with some debugger ideas myself, but I’m much more interested in hearing how experienced engineers see this problem today.

I was sick at home with the flu this weekend, and went on a bit of a Wikipedia deep dive about active American lighthouses. Searching around a bit, it was very hard to find a single source or interactive map of active beacons, and a description of what the "characteristic" meant. The Coast Guard maintains a list of active lights though, that they publish annually (https://www.navcen.uscg.gov/light-list-annual-publication). With some help from Claude Code, it wasn't hard to extract the lat/long and put together a small webapp that shows a map of these light stations and illustrates their characteristic with an animated visualization..

Of course, this shouldn't be used as a navigational aid, merely for informational purposes! Though having lived in Seattle and San Francisco I thought it was quite interesting.