Developers don't use debuggers because neither the benefits of using one nor the harm of not using one are immediately obvious. And when you first start learnin

Developers don't use debuggers because neither the benefits of using one nor the harm of not using one are immediately obvious. And when you first start learning how to program, the cognitive load of picking up a new language, its tooling and quirks, you simply don't have the energy to understand yet another piece of complex software. Worse, you may not even know there's such thing as a debugger! So we all do "printf debugging" because printing to the screen is the first thing you learn, and it's obvious how you can use it to inspect program state. However, this is a novice trap, as more experienced developers would know that printf debugging may not work for subtle cases, and may even steer you in the completely wrong direction. But by the time said novices encounter such bugs, they've already picked up the "bad habit", and it's difficult to go back and unlearn it. Some also feels that needing a specialized tool to find bugs is a weakness, as you ought to be able to reason about the code without aid. But that is folly, for if so, why use editors with syntax coloring (shouldn't you know int is a keyword w/o being pointed out) or auto-completion (shouldn't you memorize all exported functions)? In fact it's the opposite: a good debugger greatly aids in comprehension, since you get to catch corner cases happen in action, and with sufficient context for you to figure out how it'd happened. There was a time when many developers also don't use a D(VCS) of some sort, for similar reasons. But of course git has a celebrity champion, and so the rest followed. Almost all the excuses from this thread people had raised about not wanting to learn how to use a debugger properly apply to git (and to all D(VCS) to varying extents), but you'd be ridiculed for not using it. IMO debuggers need a similar champion before our opinions change, but alas IIRC Linus himself is not too fond of debuggers... That said, the state OSS debuggers is terrible, so they're not helping their own cause. Moreover, they are often "buggy" themselves. I put that in quotes because sometimes a "bug" is actually correct, but unintuitive behavior for inexperienced users (pop quiz: how do breakpoints work?), or just poor / nonexistent documentation. Nonetheless, the result is the same, and nothing loses your trust in a tool faster than finding bugs in it while trying to fix your own bugs.