From my (super limited) experience, debuggers shine when:
- You're using a dynamically typed language.
Something like Rust can eliminate most bugs that come from incorrect data types. For me, a lot of bugs used to come from types that were different from what I expect.
- It is super easy to run your program with a debugger attached.
If your code needs to run on a K8s cluster or a dedicated test machine instead of locally, logs are much easier to get hold of than a remote debug session. Some people aren't even aware that they can attach a debugger to a computer over the network, or inside a Docker container.
- Your environment.
If you don't use an IDE that supports a debugger, it's another friction point. I'm not sure if Vim has something similar to, say, PyCharm's debugger.
Similarly, if you're a junior, and you reach out to a senior and they tell you to debug using logs, you probably will never switch to using a debugger yourself.
- You're using a dynamically typed language.
Something like Rust can eliminate most bugs that come from incorrect data types. For me, a lot of bugs used to come from types that were different from what I expect.
- It is super easy to run your program with a debugger attached.
If your code needs to run on a K8s cluster or a dedicated test machine instead of locally, logs are much easier to get hold of than a remote debug session. Some people aren't even aware that they can attach a debugger to a computer over the network, or inside a Docker container.
- Your environment.
If you don't use an IDE that supports a debugger, it's another friction point. I'm not sure if Vim has something similar to, say, PyCharm's debugger.
Similarly, if you're a junior, and you reach out to a senior and they tell you to debug using logs, you probably will never switch to using a debugger yourself.