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Comment by GuB-42

6 hours ago

If programmers don't use a debugger, that's because the debugger is bad.

For me, the ideal debugger is one you never leave. That is you are in a debugging session, maybe with your code running, or stopped on a breakpoint, and you write your code without leaving the session. You can see the values of your variables as you type them, the branches that will be taken, etc... When an error condition happen, you break on it, and still without leaving the session, you can fix the code, roll back before the error happened and see if it passes. IntelliJ is close to that, and it seems like some tools from the video game industry are even better.

Debugging should be natural, it shouldn't be something you pull out as a last resort. If it is not natural, it is a bad debugger, or a bad development environment, period. Maybe there are reasons for why it is bad, maybe the language designers have other priorities, which is acceptable, but it doesn't change the fact that it is bad. Same goes for slow compile times by the way.