[alkonaut]

So the argument is that if you use a debugger you become lazy and stop reasoning about the code. That's a pretty terrible argument against any tool. "It's a good tool, but if used wrong has drawbacks". I have heard a similar argument against syntax highlighting. I'm not kidding.

I'm sure I'd write more thought through code if I took a screwdriver and removed my backspace key. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea.

How about: use a debugger AND reason about the code? My pet theory: The reason the listed developers Kerningham, Torvalds et.al, don't use debuggers is because the debuggers they have available just aren't good enough. It would be very interesting to have them describe their development environments, and what debuggers they have actually used, and in which languages.

A debugger isn't much better than println if you are working in a weak type system and with a poorly integrated development environment. If you do C on linux/unix and command line gdb is your debugger then I understand why println is just as convenient.

println doesn't solve the problem of breaking in the correct location, trying a change without restarting (by moving the next statement marker to the line before the chnaged line), It doesn't support complex watch statements to filter data or visualize large data structures and so on.