[arghnoname]

I am also this person. I'm a systems programmer (kernel and systems software, often in C, C++, golang, bit of rust, etc)

What I find is that if my code isn't working, I stop what I'm doing. I look at it. I think really hard, I add some print statements and asserts to verify some assumptions, and I iterate a small handful of times to find my faulty assumption and fix it. Many, many times during the 'think hard' and look at the code part, I can fix the bug without any iterations.

This almost always works if I really understand what I'm doing and I'm being thoughtful.

Sometimes though, I don't know what the hell is going on and I'm in deep waters. In those cases I might use a debugger, but I often feel like I've failed. I almost never use them. When I helped undergrads with debuggers it often felt like their time would be more productively spent reasoning about their code instead of watching it.

[throwaway2037]

Your list of programming languages excluded Java. Please ignore this reply if Java is included.

Are you aware of the amazing Java debugger feature of "Drop to Frame"? Combined with "hot-injection" (compile new code, then inject into current debug'd JVM), it is crazy and amazing. (I love C#, but the hot-injection feature is much worse than Java -- more than 50% of the time, C# compiler rejects my hot-injection, but about 80% of the time, JVM accepts my hot-injection.) When working on source code where it is very difficult to acquire data for the algorithm, having the ability to inspect in a debugger, make minor changes the the algorithm, then re-compile, inject new class/method defs, the drop to frame, the re-exec the same code in the same debug session is incredibly powerful.

[arghnoname]

Yes, that sounds pretty cool and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to see the utility in this. I've done a lot work on lower level software, often enough on platforms where the debuggers are tough to get working well anyway.

The plus side of less capable tooling is it tends to limit how complex software can be--the pain is just too noticeable. I haven't liked java in the past because it seems very difficult without the tooling and I never had to do enough java to learn that stuff. Java's tooling does seem quite excellent once it is mastered.

[throwaway2037]

This part: "I haven't liked java in the past because it seems very difficult without the tooling"

If you are a low level programmer, I understand your sentiment. A piece of advice, when you need to use Java (or other JVM languages), just submit to all the bloat -- use an IDE, like IntelliJ, that needs 4GB+ of RAM. The increase in programmer productivity is a wild ride coming from embedded and kernel programming. (The same can be said for C#.)