Okay, so I wanted to mess around with this “tracey long” thing I saw someone mention online. I had no clue what it was, just a name, but it sounded kinda cool, so I figured, why not?
First things first, I Googled it. Just typed in “tracey long” and hit enter. The results? Well, a bunch of stuff about some actress, which wasn’t what I was looking for. Clearly, I needed to be more specific. I added some words I thought would help, like ‘tracey long program’ and ‘tracey long code’, searching around for something that seemed more like a tool or technique.
Digging Deeper
After clicking around on a few pages from the search, I finally found it. It was a simple command-line tool used with python! It’s to help check out what your code is doing step by step.
So, here is what I tried:
First up, I opened my terminal. I have a Mac, and use iTerm2, so this part was pretty simple.
Next, I made a new folder just for this, using `mkdir tracey_test`.
Then I changed the directory with `cd tracey_test` to get into the directory.
I use VS Code, So I created a very simple Python file with `touch *` in my terminal, and then opened VS Code with `code .`.
Then I wrote a super basic Python script, just a simple `for` loop that prints some numbers:
for i in range(5):
print(f"The number is: {i}")
The final step to make sure things worked, was to ran it in the command line. `python -m tracey *`
Seeing it in Action
I ran the script, and boom! The terminal filled up with all sorts of stuff. Every line that got executed, every variable, it was all there. It was kind of overwhelming at first, but then I started to see the pattern. I could actually follow along with what my code was doing, step by step.
It’s pretty basic, I know, but it was cool to see it work. I can definitely see how this “tracey long” thing could be useful for debugging bigger, more complicated programs. I’m definitely going to play around with it some more!
