It's a bit funny for me. I've learned programming in a time when debuggers still had to be invented, so I've been doing what Grey Alien suggests all my life and never became friendly with debuggers. I just don't miss them when they are not there or not working properly. And if they are there, I usually don't even bother to look at them.
I've worked for a couple of years for a compiler vendor. Except for one person there, I can hardly remember anyone of the team using the debugger that came with our compiler. Everybody did it the way Grey described above. I think we all must have been 'old school'. But when you have to debug multi-threaded software, you will soon find out that most debuggers are not worth crap.
Imagine you were using Python, Perl, PHP or any other scripting language. You would not have the luxury of having a debugger either. Would you still doubt their readiness for production use?
I never noticed that the BlitzMax or Xbase++ or PowerBASIC or Borland Pascal or Visual C#.NET debugger suck because I simply never really used any of them. And still, I was able to ship software written in these languages. For me, plain and simple, a debugger is not an essential tool.
That does not mean I am defending broken software. When you ship a development tool, it should work properly.
I've worked for a couple of years for a compiler vendor. Except for one person there, I can hardly remember anyone of the team using the debugger that came with our compiler. Everybody did it the way Grey described above. I think we all must have been 'old school'. But when you have to debug multi-threaded software, you will soon find out that most debuggers are not worth crap.
Imagine you were using Python, Perl, PHP or any other scripting language. You would not have the luxury of having a debugger either. Would you still doubt their readiness for production use?
I never noticed that the BlitzMax or Xbase++ or PowerBASIC or Borland Pascal or Visual C#.NET debugger suck because I simply never really used any of them. And still, I was able to ship software written in these languages. For me, plain and simple, a debugger is not an essential tool.
That does not mean I am defending broken software. When you ship a development tool, it should work properly.