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.