They also talk past each other because the value of debuggers vastly depends on what you're debugging. It's relatively easy to get value out of a debugger in a

They also talk past each other because the value of debuggers vastly depends on what you're debugging. It's relatively easy to get value out of a debugger in a straightforward synchronous userland process. It's much harder in a complex embedded application full of threads, callbacks, asynchronous execution, and a target where you may need to set up something like remote debugging and potentially tweak the whole system config to make it possible in the first place. This is also more likely to be the kind of system that doesn't run from your fancy IDE..