Why aren't students taught to use a debugger? [closed]

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

There's a lot of homework questions here on SO.

I would guess that 90%+ can be solved by stepping through the code in a debugger, and observing program/variable state.

I was never taught to use a debugger. I simply printed and read the GDB manual and stepped through their examples. When I used Visual Studio for the first time, I remembered thinking, Wow! how much simpler can this be, click to set a breakpoint, mouse over a variable for the value, press a key to step, the immediate window, debug.print, etc...

At any rate, are students "taught" to use a debugger? If not, why not? (Perhaps a better question is, why can't they learn to use a debugger themselves... maybe they need to be told that there is such a tool that can help them...)

How long does it take to learn to use a debugger?