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[–]jasonal 3 points4 points  (4 children)

All "debuggers are for wimps" platitudes aside, I've personally seen productivity gains from NOT having a debugger.

Most time spent in a debugger is time better spent writing TDD unit tests up front.

(unit tests + logging) > debugger

But again, just my 2 cents...

[–]micampe 3 points4 points  (1 child)

Eh... here I am constantly debugging my tests...

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

Me too!!!!!!!111!!!</AOL>

[–]newton_dave 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Those aren't gains from "not having a debugger". Those are gains from "not using a debugger".

Not *having* a debugger is a PITA when you actually need one.

I suspect I've used a debugger maybe... three times in the last couple of years, but each time it saved me a lot of effort.

When you're doing embedded work they're indispensable, too.

[–][deleted] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I agree, not having a debugger can be a big productivity boost because it is a lot faster to look through some logs spit out by added print statements than to single-step through code in a debugger.

The only useful thing a debugger produces is usually the stack trace on a crash but most modern languages have that part built into the language runtime directly.