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I wonder if Brian Kerninghan was using modern tooling or that comment was using quote from 70’s.

It's from The Practice of Programming, published 1999. Not a lot has changed in debuggers since then from what I can see.

Debugging in Visual Studio by Microsoft has changed a lot in last 5 years, JetBrains IDE debugging a lot as well.

I can debug .NET application and change code live, change variable states if needed. Watch variables and all kinds of helpers like stack navigation was immensely improved since I started 15 years ago.

I can say debugging Java/.NET applications is totally different experience than using debugger from 1999.

Multi threaded apps debugging and all kinds of helpers i visual debuggers.

I just fail to see why someone would waste time putting in debug statements when they can configure debug session with conditional break points.

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