Negative or not, I really appreciate the constructive criticism.
In response to your comments on watch: Indeed, right now it only identifies AST nodes of type "asgn". I imagine other mutations like append and others have different types too, I just haven't gotten around to implementing that. My bad for posting this in a pre-release state.
"Even if you modified the code to support this, you wouldn't be able to control access everywhere that piece of data went."
I can see two potential solutions:
1. Identifying nodes of type "call" that have a watched variable as an arg, and then adding an if statement to check if it has changed and printing it only if it has.
2. Analyzing AST of ThirdPartyLib.do_stuff(arg1), identify statements that mutate arg1, and logging a change after the call in the original program if arg1 is changed. This way even if the value isn't changed, it's still logged because it was mutated (or at least attempted to), which is probably more desirable than solution 1.
In response to Mock: Aside from Mock, people have told me they prefer the logging library, pdb, IDEs, etc. for debugging. PyScribe isn't meant to be a separate method of debugging, I intended it to supplement my preferred way, which is just using print statements. Might be it's not the most powerful, but its purpose isn't to compete with other methods of debugging.
In response to your comments on watch: Indeed, right now it only identifies AST nodes of type "asgn". I imagine other mutations like append and others have different types too, I just haven't gotten around to implementing that. My bad for posting this in a pre-release state.
"Even if you modified the code to support this, you wouldn't be able to control access everywhere that piece of data went." I can see two potential solutions: 1. Identifying nodes of type "call" that have a watched variable as an arg, and then adding an if statement to check if it has changed and printing it only if it has. 2. Analyzing AST of ThirdPartyLib.do_stuff(arg1), identify statements that mutate arg1, and logging a change after the call in the original program if arg1 is changed. This way even if the value isn't changed, it's still logged because it was mutated (or at least attempted to), which is probably more desirable than solution 1.
In response to Mock: Aside from Mock, people have told me they prefer the logging library, pdb, IDEs, etc. for debugging. PyScribe isn't meant to be a separate method of debugging, I intended it to supplement my preferred way, which is just using print statements. Might be it's not the most powerful, but its purpose isn't to compete with other methods of debugging.