I don't think it's meaningful to compare. Erlang/Elixir work with immutable values, so when you call a function, assuming it's side-effect free, you always get

I don't think it's meaningful to compare. Erlang/Elixir work with immutable values, so when you call a function, assuming it's side-effect free, you always get the same result. Add to that the fact that there are no global variables (outside of table-like things like ETS), and that you can jump on the running system in an Erlang/Elixir shell and call any exported function and immediately see the results, debugging becomes much, much easier. I can honestly say that I have not needed a stepping-style symbolic debugger since 2008. And when you find and fix a bug, you can copy the fixed code file (.beam file) to the server, start a remote shell, and do this: > l(my_module). and the new code is running, with no perceptible perturbation to the system. There are also other tools like dbg that let you monitor calls to specific module/functions based on pattern matches. The representation of these pattern matches is powerful but not so pretty - but it gets the job done. Nothing's a panacea, and Erlang/Elixir undoubtedly have their warts, but for the Erlang VM's use case - soft real-time, extremely robust, highly concurrent distributed systems - I believe they are peerless. One of the warts may be that the ecosystem doesn't have a library for every possible scenario, but that's improving rapidly, and in many cases, some of these are trivial to write. On the plus side, the quality of code is generally pretty good. It is very challenging to describe what a massive level of confidence a hybrid-functional, battle-tested language and environment like this affords a system designer. So debugging in this environment is very different and hard to compare directly to a line-by-line stepping debugger. Even if such a tool may be available (and things change so quickly these days, I probably missed that), it's easier to do without it. It's so difficult to convey the experience of using this ecosystem, one cannot do it justice in a HN comment. T be fair, there are so many mature tools in more heavily used ecosystems like (I suppose) Java, that some may give up on Erlang/Elixir prematurely if used to that level of tooling.