[enriquto]

First of all, I agree 100% that a debugger is an indispensable tool. I just say that it is often not necessary or useful when you are writing new code or reading old code that you are supposed to edit. Your example about interpreting a crash dump is definitive.

I've had a fair share of using debuggers in my life, and I ended with my anti-debugging stance as a matter of fatigue, and a sense of time lost. I know what debuggers are capable of, especially regarding data visualization. But for your example of the variable watch, what are you going to watch, precisely? That the value of a variable is always positive? That it increases one by one? All these things are better served by assertions. What kind of information can be inferred by just looking at the evolution of values of a variable that is not easily formalized as an assert or a simple in-code test?