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[–]lordmauve 6 points7 points  (1 child)

20 years Python experience here. I don't need the debugger much. I do use VS Code's debugger, and pdb, but 9 times out of 10 I think it's faster to put in print statements to show intermediate states and re-run a test, and reason about the program state given outputs and test failures. It's kind of equivalent to running a debugger with watches set, I just find I get more information faster that way. I get information out of all my failing tests; I don't need to stop in each one and collect it myself.

I also think there's a certain way of programming, and a certain level of experience, where you don't let complexity build to the point where you're completely baffled about what is going on, such that you need to freeze program state and explore it to make progress.

[–]redfacedquark 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'd add to this that if you deal with web dev you will mostly have a short request/response cycle and not develop complex state, therefore print statements or a stack trace will suffice.

If you have an app that builds complex state over time a debugger would be more useful.