I honestly don’t know the answer, I guess this is exactly what this whole debate comes down to. In theory all the tools are there, in practice people see very mixed results.
I understand that some people prefer to work from home, but there seems to be a narrative that every single one good software engineer is in that camp, and I honestly don’t see where this belief came from… I very much miss the days where I could meet all the junior members of my team in the office and quickly sort out whatever was blocking them etc.
The problem here is that if the idea of using debuggers becomes an unfashionable niche then the next language won’t provide one at all.
Given how great Java/C#/JS debuggers are, one could hope that every new language will ship with a working debugger, that it would be table stakes.
But there’s a whole generation of working programmers that started their careers in Go and were told debuggers are lame all along, so it’s hard to blame them for not using one.
I am very much in the opposite camp, I am 10x more productive in tech stacks where I can use an interactive debugger.
It’s not that I enjoy stepping through code line by line, I rely on a debugger to verify if my assumptions about “starting conditions” of a certain piece of code are correct and, if so, at which point my understanding of how things should be no longer reflect reality.
This can all be done with printf, if you knew ahead of time what you want to print. But most of the time I don’t, the whole point is that I do interactive exploration of the program state (“evaluate expression” is the main feature of a good debugger). When I find a problem I dig deeper, which is a lot faster within a debugger session than any recompilation loop I’ve ever seen (even in Go).
In similar spirit I play with SQL queries when given a data set that I need to extract something from.