When one of these crash dumps arrives in my in-box, I load it in the debugger (with matching symbols) to try to understand the root cause of the crash. Does that qualify as having a "need" to fire up the debugger?

Ok, so I need to make it clearer: I don't think there's ever a need to fire up the debugger to step through your code. Using a debugger to read a dump file is nothing which applies to the OP's use case and is not the point of the debugger criticism in the famous quotes.

Your liking of the transient nature of debugging sessions baffles me (I may have misunderstood your intent).

In my experience a debugging session rarely immediately spots the root cause of the problem. I am seeing symptoms, from where I go backward and try to figure out why some data are different than I expect. Often I'm looking at code I'm not familiar with. Occasionally I'm following a red herring. None of this is hard-earned insights: the debugger makes it very convenient. Whatever I learn from looking at the wrong places is nothing worth to keep for posterity.

The make-the-code-better stuff starts when I've cornered the root cause, because only then I know what actually adds value to the code.

In reply to Re^6: Using the perl debugger to look at a renaming files function by haj
in thread Using the perl debugger to look at a renaming files function by Aldebaran

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