I don't use a debugger. When I have a problem that I need to narrow down I state my hypotyhesis of what is going on in some kind of unit test and narrow it down that way.
I am currently working on a Python/Django project of around 45k lines of code, 28k of which are tests. For me, this approach works quite well. It is not that I am against debugging or that I don't value debugging as a tool, but I just never feel the need to use one.
The tests also have a nice side-effect: because I do TDD a lot, I mostly end up with a lot of small understandable units, so I am effectively preventing code with properties that need me to follow each statement one by one.
I hardly ever feel the need to interrupt the running process to inspect the current variables. In many cases, this would be futile anyway, because I started writing a lot of generators.
I am currently working on a Python/Django project of around 45k lines of code, 28k of which are tests. For me, this approach works quite well. It is not that I am against debugging or that I don't value debugging as a tool, but I just never feel the need to use one.
The tests also have a nice side-effect: because I do TDD a lot, I mostly end up with a lot of small understandable units, so I am effectively preventing code with properties that need me to follow each statement one by one.
I hardly ever feel the need to interrupt the running process to inspect the current variables. In many cases, this would be futile anyway, because I started writing a lot of generators.