I'd have to support this as well. Many folks always reel in terror when I tell them I almost never use a debugger, or I'm using gdb or lldb instead of some graphical thing if I decide that it's worth actually running.
I think they have their place as tools but largely that's dwarfed by other practices. In the notion of systems thinking, I try to limit the scenarios where needing a debugger is seen as the natural extension. This means having tests, practicing type-driven design, mapping my APIs to some real-world model (and knowing where that fails or falls short), using languages that obviate the existence of certain classes of bugs (e.g. Rust, languages with a GC), etc.
Sometimes you're trying to inspect behaviour that changes in the moment, and debuggers do great there. However, I'll say that some of the most interesting bugs I've dealt with were only visible in release builds with no debug symbols, so my debugger didn't do much of anything for me there.
Plus, this doesn't even dig into other tools that _aren't_ taught because people reach for their debuggers. How many of the folks grabbing debuggers every day have been given the same speech / sentiment given to toolz above about strace? valgrind / address sanitizer? thread sanitizer? syslog?
I feel like this comment might be a bit rambly, but I was hoping to expound on what toolz mentioned above -- there's a lot of ways to crack an egg here and the debugger is something I almost never reach for.
I think they have their place as tools but largely that's dwarfed by other practices. In the notion of systems thinking, I try to limit the scenarios where needing a debugger is seen as the natural extension. This means having tests, practicing type-driven design, mapping my APIs to some real-world model (and knowing where that fails or falls short), using languages that obviate the existence of certain classes of bugs (e.g. Rust, languages with a GC), etc.
Sometimes you're trying to inspect behaviour that changes in the moment, and debuggers do great there. However, I'll say that some of the most interesting bugs I've dealt with were only visible in release builds with no debug symbols, so my debugger didn't do much of anything for me there.
Plus, this doesn't even dig into other tools that _aren't_ taught because people reach for their debuggers. How many of the folks grabbing debuggers every day have been given the same speech / sentiment given to toolz above about strace? valgrind / address sanitizer? thread sanitizer? syslog?
I feel like this comment might be a bit rambly, but I was hoping to expound on what toolz mentioned above -- there's a lot of ways to crack an egg here and the debugger is something I almost never reach for.