Having heard these claims myself, I firmly believe that developers who eschew debuggers are either severely handicapping themselves out of misguided bravado, or at best are too lazy to invest minimal learning time to establish basic proficiency for huge reward. There's no reason not to avail yourself of extremely powerful tools like that.
That said, maybe don't start with text-mode debuggers...
It's not even just spaghetti but things that are very obtuse too. I often need a debugger whenever I see things in the code like if(variant.sourceId == null) and then below is the large unnamed block of code that also doesn't give any indication of what it implies. Because I have no idea what it implies, I have no idea how the data got into that state, so it's like... What case triggers this code?
I often wind up refactoring that stuff after computing an understanding of it. It usually comes out significanty easier to read and not likely you require a debugger to understand it.
So I that regard I think debuggers enable unnecessarily difficult to understand code to hang around.
Debugging by printing the state of variables too frequently and resorting to line-by-line debugging of every function can be inefficient if it becomes a crutch for the developer. This could be due to a lack of confidence or a lack of understanding — or just habitual.
>> I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_.
I liken developers who proudly say they don’t use debuggers to surgeons who don’t take X-rays.
Sure, you could, but why make your life harder?
Today, I use a variety of tools and languages and ... hmmm... I don't actually remember the last time I used a debugger on my own code.
Sometimes a bug just doesn't pop when debugging due to differences in the memory management of the debug mode or race conditions in multi-threaded due to different timings...
So, "text-debugging" (like printf("I'm here") debugging) sometimes is the only way to find precious bugs.
Back in the day most of my colleagues only relied in printf debugging. But we were just a bunch of linux geeks developing kernel modules, linux apps and QT apps (QT brought a nice IDE for debugging, truth to be told)...