[thewebcount]

> But his main point is that debuggers distract developers from seeing the problem as a whole rather than just understanding what's going on the vicinity of that problematic line. So, the debugger incentivises small, targeted fixes rather than bigger solutions for more systematic problems.

What a bizarre take. Just today I had to use a debugger to figure out where there was a deadlock in our program and why. No amount of printfs would have made that speedy. In the debugger I just stop the program once it's hung and look at all the threads to see which threads are holding which locks and which are waiting to obtain locks. From there I can now see it's a lock inversion because we weren't being careful about the order of taking our locks in a few places. That lead to doing a wider check to see if there were other similar cases, and whether we needed to rethink anything in particular.

The debugger generally gives me an overview of the whole program in a way that a bunch of printf statements can't. (Which isn't to say that printf doesn't have a place in debugging - it certainly does.)

[aflag]

There’s more than one way to skin a cat. People not using a debugger are not mindlessly adding prints, sort of a poor man’s debugger. Those people are figuring out the problem from a different perspective. In your case, one may trying to come up with a theory as to what could cause a deadlock and think of ways to cause it to always happen consistently. Before running anything, they would be trying to understand what could possibly go wrong. Then they test the theory. You can perhaps see that, if someone is always doing that, they can get quite good at it. They would also develop quite a good intuition on what to expect from the code base over time. Whereas, someone who just goes straight to a debugger may not develop such an intimate relationship with the code base.

It depends on individual’s strengths and weakness as well. Neither way is going to be better for everyone. Each person has to find out what works for them.