[pbiggar]

I think we need to rethink what we mean by debugger. In Dark (https://darklang.com), we don't have a debugger. Instead we combine the editor with the language, and then when you're editing code you have available at all times a particular program trace (typically a real production value, which are automatically saved because dark also provides infra). As a result, you can immediately see the value of a variable in that trace.

Is this a debugger? Sure. It sorta lets you step through the program and inspect state at various points. But it's also a REPL, and it also strongly resembles inserting print statements everywhere. It's also like an exception tracker/crash reporter and a tracing framework.

IMO it's both simpler and more powerful than any of these. It's like if every statement had a println that you never have to add but is available whenever you want to inspect it. Or like a debugger where you never have to painfully step through the program to get to the state you want.

So overall, I think we need to think deeper about what a debugger is and how it can work. Most of the people quoted do not have a good debugger available to them, nor a good debugging workflow.