[hellcow]

I believe you, but I haven't encountered anything like this in my work in a higher-level language, and this is my first push into manual memory management since I studied C in college many years ago.

Can you offer some examples of times when it has been indispensable, so that I can understand when this is useful?

[throwawaymaths]

don't remember any off the top of my head. I use elixir, I do often dive into the data structures with IO.inspect(..., structs: false) which exposes all of the "hidden" fields. Enough so that I know how to do this without having to look it up.

I suppose you could also use the debugger, but I value my time.