In general, I find a sense of learned helplessness among coworkers. They don't feel like they can get much useful out of the debugger.
In a way they are often right, but in part because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't use the debugger much, then excessive amount of indirection in many codebases is academic to you, the way (unfortunately) people think of color blindness, accessibility, hell internationalization for some. It's abstract, not something you have to deal with all the time. It doesn't affect you personally so you just ignore it (in other words, complete lack of empathy).
Once the codebase is full of shared mutable state, lasagna code, lavaflow antipatterns, callbacks, handlers, etc, then it really does seem like it's easier to pepper some print statements around and pray.
It's coherent, but wrong. Like a teenager's justification for how they deal with their messy room. Your life really would be easier and healthier if you cleaned some of this shit up, man.
There's another way out, which is that better debuggers can be much more effective at punching through that complexity. E.g., rr/Pernosco-style reverse dataflow tracking lets you jump from an observed value directly to where it was set, which often bypasses a lot of byzantine control flow. When a callback is invoked, we could show you where the callback was set as well as where it was called. Etc.
In a way they are often right, but in part because it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don't use the debugger much, then excessive amount of indirection in many codebases is academic to you, the way (unfortunately) people think of color blindness, accessibility, hell internationalization for some. It's abstract, not something you have to deal with all the time. It doesn't affect you personally so you just ignore it (in other words, complete lack of empathy).
Once the codebase is full of shared mutable state, lasagna code, lavaflow antipatterns, callbacks, handlers, etc, then it really does seem like it's easier to pepper some print statements around and pray.
It's coherent, but wrong. Like a teenager's justification for how they deal with their messy room. Your life really would be easier and healthier if you cleaned some of this shit up, man.