I agree with what several have already pointed out here, that a key point is that the famous programmers interviewed already understood their code and hence usi

I agree with what several have already pointed out here, that a key point is that the famous programmers interviewed already understood their code and hence using a debugger to better understand it is not particularly useful. I've been struck over the years at how one of key benefits of the Smalltalk environment -- being able to explore/change things in a program while it's running -- is not more widely regarded in the field. I occurs to me now that the interviewed programmers might have already gotten much of the cognitive benefit of such exploration at the beginning of a project. For them, print statements and listings are a way of confirming details of what they expect to be happening as the code runs. For un-godlike programmers (and maintenance work), debugging is complicated by the lack of deep understanding of how the code is supposed to work, hence the need for more exploration time and debuggers.