> However, the fact that Linus Torvalds, who is in charge of a critical piece of our infrastructure made of 15 million lines of code (the Linux kernel), does no

> However, the fact that Linus Torvalds, who is in charge of a critical piece of our infrastructure made of 15 million lines of code (the Linux kernel), does not use a debugger tells us something about debuggers It _may_ tell us something about debuggers. Probably that they are not as useful when it comes to OS kernels. Just as well, it _may_ tell us something about Linus Torvalds. Probably what tools he is more proficient with, or likes more. > Debuggers were conceived in an era where we worked on moderately small projects, with simple processors (no thread, no out-of-order execution), simple compilers, relatively small problems and no formal testing. Unix was conceived in another era too, but modern Unices are totally different and have been adapted to modern times. So have debuggers. When I debug a Java program in IntelliJ I can stop and run threads as I like; OOO execution is transparent; so is both high-level compilation (javac) and low-level JIT compilation by the JVM. > in order to catch bugs, we often need to be able to run with sufficiently large and representative data sets. When we’re at this point, the debugger is usually a crude tool to use You'd typically use a debugger to understand why one of the tests with your large dataset fails, after you have already noticed that there is a bug. You don't use a debugger to notice that a bug exists at all. This article really has a point, but it's buried under crude logic, and the elephant in the room is that "debuggers vs. tests" is a false dichotomy.