[hyporthogon]

Debugging is useful even from a merely academic perspective if engineering is an academic discipline (I think it is). Reality pushes up against you, so you figure out what it's doing by looking at what happens and guessing at what might have caused it. You aren't circumscribed by your model (as you are in a purely mathematical simplification; consider the inutility of Navier-Stokes for many engineering applications) when the 'bug' is smacking you in the face. This isn't just Popperian falsifiability; it's also just (more fundamentally) abduction.

The article doesn't press this point very hard, but I take the central argument to be in favor of 'systematically approach[ing] problems [of the sort that debugging instantiates]' which is just as much 'academy' as 'industry'.