This is perhaps one of the most harmful statements I’ve ever read on Hacker News. You’re not doing it wrong if you use a tool to help you understand what your program is doing. Should you follow good design patterns, like using small functions when writing your software? Yes. Should you minimize complex state? Sure. Should you use tools to help you understand what your program is doing? Absolutely. The two are not mutually exclusive.

There are a LOT of different ways to write software. Some more stateful than others. Some lower level than others. Some more asyncrounous than others. Some more functional. Some more object oriented.

Your experience with the software you write in your day to day, is not the same stack and may not even be in the same universe as what others are attempting. Writing a React app is very different from writing a game in Unity, which is very different than writing a game engine in C++ which is very different that writing large scale services that talk to clusters of computers and hardware devices, which is different than writing some low level library in Rust or Haskell or doing data science in R or Octave.

Please fucking stop with this “one right way”, “you’re dodging it wrong” dogmatic bullshit. Your limited worldview does not apply to ALL of software development.

Use a fucking REPL if you want. Use a debugger if you want. Use logs and traces if you want.

Just try to write good software, try to understand your code, and ignore dogmatic and valiantly bad advice and opinions like the parent comment on Hacker News.