[speedplane]

Coding efficiency is heavily influenced by the time it takes to iterate. Once you write something, the time it takes to test it out, change it, and try something new provides a nice upper limit on how fast you can develop software.

The speed of iterating changes to code has a huge influence on the tools that you use. In a language like C, compiling new changes to code can take many seconds or sometimes minutes. Thus, you'll want to have heavy duty tools that can carefully analyze how your code is operating.

In contrast, in a scripting language, changing a line and rerunning the code can take far less time (a few seconds for even large programs). Thus, you can iterate more often, and so you don't have to be as careful in each iteration.

The moral of the story is that debuggers can be extremely helpful for some languages, especially those that take a long time to compile. However, while still helpful, they are far less helpful for languages that you can run quickly (I'm thinking Python here).