[Stratoscope]

Those are some great debugging stories. Yep, for that kind of work I would probably do something more like what you were doing. I also appreciated your last comment:

> I think both approaches have merits and if someone tells you that one is superior to the other, that says a lot about their level of experience and the types of work they've done.

Indeed. We have so many great tools available to us, but the best choice of tools will vary a lot depending on the work you're doing, whether it is logging, JTAG and a 'scope, or whatever you have available.

It's quite a contrast to this quote from the article:

> ...the fact that Linus Torvalds, who is in charge of a critical piece of our infrastructure made of 15 million lines of code (the Linux kernel), does not use a debugger tells us something about debuggers

I don't think that tells us anything about debuggers, it just tells us that they aren't useful for Linus's particular work, or possibly he just doesn't like them. I doubt that Linus has ever said, "You should never use a debugger regardless of the kind of programming you're doing."