[kstenerud]

I think this is a problem of language and communication (what he says in the post vs what we receive and understand reading it). I feel like I've groked what he's saying because I have a similar mindset.

Yes, debuggers are useful in some circumstances, but most of the time I don't reach for one. I usually start out by looking at the code surrounding a problem and thinking about what circumstances could lead to the erroneous data. From there, it's pretty simple to stuff in some carefully selected print statements to make it report on some of the things it's doing, so that I can check my assumptions. More often than not, this is enough to identify the underlying problem in a few minutes and fix it. Either that, or I get some pointers to other areas that should be investigated.

It's only when this initial triage fails to give me any meaningful leads that I start thinking about what tool will likely be the most effective for the problem at hand. It's usually a judgment call based on how complicated it will be to separate relevant data from irrelevant, and what tool will most efficiently give a window complete enough to describe what I'm looking at, yet small enough for my brain to hold it all. Also, the need for aggregate vs individual data will play a role in the decision. Sometimes this phase is likely to be faster with a debugger, sometimes (and in my 20 years experience, usually) not.