Recently, I acquired a rubber frog.
In this blog post, I would like to present the advantages of rubber frog debugging over the more traditional rubber duck debugging. As a short summary, here are the most important points:
- frogs are green
- frogs and ducks both make similar noises
- frogs eat bugs by design
Frogs are green ¶
Yellow is a signal color. This means, you are more likely to look toward it, while you are coding. That is a distraction. Frogs on the other hand are green. Green is not a signal color, meaning you are less likely to get distracted while coding. That makes you instantly more productive!
Easy transition ¶
Both frogs and ducks are making the same noise: “Quack”. This makes it easy for people who have previously employed rubber duck debugging to switch to rubber frog debugging.
Frogs are eating bugs ¶
Probably the most important point. Frogs are natural debuggers. They are eating insects and other small animals, including bugs. That gives frogs an instant advantage over bread-eating ducks.
So to wrap up, frogs are the ideal debugging companions, due to their natural debugging ability and their color making them less likely to distract you.
I would also like to thank my good friend Soup who came up with the advantages over traditional rubber duck debugging.