[Gibbon1]

I think a lot of people that criticize debuggers think professionals use them like a first year CS student, as a crutch because they don't understand the language they learning.

A professional uses them to trap events and then explore the programs state. And to inject faults and watch how the program explodes, or not. In that debuggers are vastly better than printf debugging.

[amitoz_azad]

"a lot of people that criticize debuggers..." But what really making me think is that big giants like Torvalds, Rob Pike, Guido van Rossum. Rober C Martin, John Graham they don't like using debuggers (https://lemire.me/blog/2016/06/21/i-do-not-use-a-debugger).

[detaro]

That article is a great example: It defines "debugger" as "single-stepping through code", and then argues against that. It's fine to argue against "single-stepping through code" as a default technique, but artificially limiting the scope.

EDIT: one of the comments by the author makes it very clear: they don't consider lots of things you can do with e.g. gdb as "using a debugger": https://lemire.me/blog/2016/06/21/i-do-not-use-a-debugger/#c... </EDIT>

The submitted article here is similar, by opening with that ridiculous example and pretending that's what using a debugger means. Debuggers don't make you bad at finding problems. Not knowing when to use which tool makes you bad at it. (And knowing how to make new tools out of your existing ones is also quite helpful)

[Nicholas_Kross]

This is a good point, thank you! I am adding a quick note in the article to clarify that it's more about the code-stepping technique itself.