It's really cute how the author added $ to insert a debugging break into the source. Instead of "debugging by printf", which is a bit tedious in brainfuck, this is driving your debugger by editing the source code. Bravo!
I recently learned you can do a similar thing with C/C++ too. Programmatically raise a SIGINT when running under gdb, and gdb will intercept that signal, at which point you can step through the code.
I was laughing in a good way, it's always cool to see not only the "thing" but how it was debugged.
As for python, I debug it by adding print() statements. No debugger involved. If there's a way to insert debugger breakpoints in the source, I'm unaware of it.