This philosophy goes back to the days of punch cards. If the programmers relied on the punch card reader to inform them of a bug, they'd be delayed by at least

This philosophy goes back to the days of punch cards. If the programmers relied on the punch card reader to inform them of a bug, they'd be delayed by at least a day and then perhaps more because someone else may be using the punch card reader when they have fixed their bugs. The reason ditching the debugger makes the programmers better is because they work through figuring out what the code will do before they write it. They know it will be good code before the debugger tells them and before they have to examine a variable to see what it contains, when they should have known before they wrote the code. These programmer articles are like investing by listening to financial analists critique stocks. You don't know how good the analyst is at their job. You don't know what is their vested interest in you believing them. For the most part, if the reader of these half-witted blogs (not necessarily this one about the debugger, but in general, and definitely the "popular" ones that get put in here all the time) would spend as much time imagining problems and solving them, or even solving real world problems, then they'd be much better coders...