[forgottenpass]

So my question is, what makes VS's debugger the "best debugger", what am I missing?

It's not (just) features, it's the interface to those features. The possibility cap may be lower for you, but that doesn't matter to people who just want an approachable interface to step through their code.

This is the part where I'm an elitist asshole: There are developers that program by spending all day, every day in the debugger. They're almost never going to do anything fancy, they just want an easy way to fix their code. Command line gdb is too much effort to learn, and of the IDEs that hook into debuggers, VS does it the best.

[tracker1]

I have to agree here... When I've had to fall into using a debugger pragmatically VS integration is probably the best experience I've had (eclipse, intellij etc don't compare).

That said, having been working a lot with node/iojs modules the past few years, I find that experience even better. I'm pretty sure others who are using scripted languages with a REPL can probably state the same. Running in an environment where you can jump in anywhere, call a particular script and replace variables for testing is a powerful experience.

I don't mean to start a scripted vs. compiled war... they both have their place. Just mentioning because people will reach for a compiler for things that could be much simpler with a scripted environment more often than not.

[HanyouHottie]

Your language doesn't need to be interpreted to have a REPL. Haskell has a REPL. The Immediate window in Visual Studio is essentially a REPL for all .NET languages (so you get that and the VS debugger together, win/win).

[lloeki]

> having been working a lot with node/iojs modules the past few years, I find that experience even better. I'm pretty sure others who are using scripted languages with a REPL can probably state the same

In Ruby-land, the pry gem called on a binding (binding.pry) is a godsend.