I do think this also has to do with personal preference, too.
Even when I'm working in an IDE that has great debugger support, I tend not to use it. I just prefer to put println's in a bunch of places, then run the code, and look through the log to see what happened.
I just find it easier to see a full log of the execution that I can open in Emacs and search through than to step through.
However, one thing I'd love to have is the ability to effectively capture the entire execution of a program, and be able to display it in log format, but then be able to jump into what the execution context was at the time of a particular log line and inspect things/step through what happened.
Even when I'm working in an IDE that has great debugger support, I tend not to use it. I just prefer to put println's in a bunch of places, then run the code, and look through the log to see what happened.
I just find it easier to see a full log of the execution that I can open in Emacs and search through than to step through.
However, one thing I'd love to have is the ability to effectively capture the entire execution of a program, and be able to display it in log format, but then be able to jump into what the execution context was at the time of a particular log line and inspect things/step through what happened.