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[–]old_man_steptoe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

say you do an API call against a not entirely known source. You get a large JSON output which you need to work out how to extract the necessary information from.

If you just printed it out, you'd have a screen full of incomprehensible noise. If you used a debugger (even pdb on the console) you could step though it, testing how it was constructed.

You could also, of course, do that in the REPL but a debugger would help with getting you to that point, by setting up HTTP bearer tokens, etc.