Early in my career I took a job at Boeing working on spacecraft simulation tools written in Ada. When I asked I was told by the other folks on the team that th

Early in my career I took a job at Boeing working on spacecraft simulation tools written in Ada. When I asked I was told by the other folks on the team that they had no ability to debug the system (i.e., they did debugging via print statements). For background, our dev environments consisted of Windows PCs which we used to ssh (using putty, exceed, etc) into a SPARC/Solaris machine to do all of our actual work. Our tools consisted of vi (not vim), clearcase, and whatever other command line tools were available (good luck asking for anything new to be installed). At some point, I guess somebody installed GNU tools on the solaris machine because I managed to find gdb while rooting around... which I'd never used before - so I set about learning. It proved to be a huge help. I tried to show it to some of the other engineers, but few seemed interested.