Real programmers don't use debuggers, but working in Visual Studio .NET 2003 all term has spoiled me. I'm becoming a worse programmer because instead of *thinking* about the code you just wrote, it's seems easier just to set a breakpoint and try it out! Plus with the "Edit & Continue" feature you can actually apply code changes to a running program. These things encourage programming by experiment instead of by design. This evening I was supposed to meet someone at the gym at eight, but I was still at my desk at 7:58 because I didn't want to leave until this stupid thing I was working on actually ran without crashing. But instead of taking the time to actually think the thing through and plan it out, I just kept tweaking things as I single stepped through problematic section of code. Of course this actually took longer and was more frustrating than doing it right because I never actually fixed the problem and left for the gym an hour later aggrivated but having accomplished nothing. Here's what a real programmer, Linus Torvalds, has to say about debuggers w.r.t. Linux kernel development. Nice.