[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

I have mostly found the people who dismissed debuggers tended to be more Unix/Linux people, probably because raw gdb is such a huge pain to use. Windows developers and Visual Studio developers where the debugging experience is so easy, tend to sing the praises of debuggers. I wonder if it a bit of sour grape for the Unix/Linux crowd?

[TheRealDunkirk]

As much of a Linux zealot as I am, you make a valid point. In college, I had a TA help me debug a C program on a VAX, and he blew through finding the problem using its native debugger, and wouldn't explain what he did. (I had an O where a 0 should have been. Or vice versa. It was a worse problem back in the days of actual terminals. He found it in literally 30 seconds after I had been bashing my head on the printout for a couple hours.) Anyway, it took me probably 10 years of professional coding before I discovered gdb, and then realized what that TA had done. All at once, I realized how far you could get without an actual debugger, and also why he never bothered to try to explain it to me. I wasn't ready. Not by a long shot. Seeing the right-click options on breakpoints in Visual Studio was... revelatory.

[pjmlp]

Depends on the UNIX, Solaris, HP-UX and NeXT/macOS are all UNIXes with good debugging experience.

Naturally none of them have had raw gdb, rather modern graphical debuggers.