Purposefully debugging without using a debugger?

Question

In chapter 5 of \"The Practice of Programming\" Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike write:

As a personal choice, we tend not to use debuggers beyond getting a st

Answer 1

I rarely use a debugger simply because we do not have one that we can attach to a live system. We can load an image and use the debugger to calculate offsets inside of structures, or translate a program counter to a file & line number. But in general, we code defensively, log errors, and keep a lot of statistics so we have a chance of diagnosing a failure post-hoc.

Having a working debugger, or an emulation environment, would have occasionally saved me days or weeks of twiddle, reproduce, diagnose.