Comment by im3w1l

It also matters which debugger you are using and which features it has. I personally find gdb to be completely awful, while some IDE debuggers are a delightful. With Java, you can hotswap code into a running program. And you could write the majority of your program like that. It becomes an interactive experience a little bit similar to using a jupyter notebook.

You can also make a weird sort of UI this way, where the way you interact with your program is by changing the code / and or state while it's running. Breakpoints prompt for input.