proners wrotearithma wroteYep. I do find stepping through code a bit superfluous in web requests since they life for so little time anyway. But hey, the tool exists, and it's there for our use just in case we need it. I hardly ever consider it a necessity, just something nice to know is out there.
Stepping through code becomes more important when you have a long living context and you need to inspect your environment for any corruption, as a sample scenario.
<insert functional programming rant here /> :P
<insert unit testing - TDD rant here /> :P
<insert general rant here /> :P
after those three rants, you'll know that you don't need a debugger :D
functional programming and debugging are not very compatible. This is a point more against functional programming rather than debugging. Debugging is essential.
Are you saying that unit testing is the answer to debugging? Debugging seems to be the much more lower cost solution. Yes unit testing has a lot of merit, but writing a unit test to exhaust all the possible problems you can fall into is "impossible". It's impossible in the simplest of cases, before even entering the realm of parallelism and what not.
Generally, the public loves debugging and relies on it heavily (either by tracing mid execution, or by setting break points, or whatever cunning technique you want to devise).
How do you unit test your unit tests? Do you? Or do you debug them? :)