[9dev]

That misses the mark. You can’t really compare a hackish ”print the world as a string“ function against a debuggers ability to stop time, walk around, pick things up, slice them open, put them somewhere else, and start time again.

That’s not just not the same league, it’s playing a whole different game.

[PontifexMinimus]

You call it haskish but it's something I've done in the pasty and find useful.

I don't find debuggers all that useful, because I often find I'm spending more time thinking about how to use the debugger rather than how to fix the bug; since debugging is hard I want tools that I don't have to think about at all, as they distract me from thinking about the bug.

Maybe that's because I don't have enough experience with a particular tool. If I used a debugger more often it would come naturally to me. But I find most of my bugs are simple enough that that doesn't happen, because I write modular code and TDD.

[9dev]

I mean sure, logging metadata is better than nothing. But that’s akin to saying you don’t need a car because your feet have never failed you at crossing distances. Yes, you need to learn driving first, and that can seem hard at the beginning, but I doubt you’d want to go back to walking after.

To each their own, but I wholeheartedly recommend learning about debuggers. It should be one of the core tools of every software engineer.