Could be because you've never used a good one. I could see how that distaste would form if all you've ever used was the likes of gdb, lldb, of (if you work in Python) pdb. But when I was switching away from Windows entirely 15 years ago, giving up windbg and Visual Studio debugger was HARD. It's so convenient when you can just _see_ what your program is doing without a lot of extra friction. The downside is, this very much disincentives the writing of tests, because you can get non-trivial pieces of code working without any tests. But with a little self-discipline, I think having a great debugger was a net positive for me, both code quality and productivity-wise.
Throughout my career, I have never met anyone who used MS tools that did not find them excellent and productivity enhancing. In fact I could probably add to MS any of the language vendors from years ago. I remember using Borlands terminal based C++ environment back in the early 90's. That's about 30 years ago and that environment is better than what I use programming on Linux today.
I have often thought that programmers posture over their tool independence to signal their excellence. Before the current generation of programmers, many programmers would proclaim how they didn't need to use higher level languages to assist them in programming because assembly language was sufficient given their reasoning powers. Today programmers proclaim they don't need types to insure data invariants as their reasoning powers are sufficient. They proclaim they don't get any value from unit testing because they can maintain correctness across all development phases using their reasoning powers alone. They proclaim they don't need automatic garbage collection because they can insure correct memory usage using their reasoning powers. They have no use for IDEs, debuggers, or profilers because they believe none of these tools could augment their reasoning powers.
Excellent programmers can indeed compensate for poor tooling through their reasoning powers alone. But if history is a guide, people who don't use the best tools, practices and technologies to produce the best work, at some point, wont produce the best work.
I think the situation on the FOSS side is compounded by the fact that gdb, while it's unquestionably not in any way "state of the art", is also not totally useless, so there's less of a reason to create something that's truly excellent. Moreover, there are whole generations of programmers now who think that tooth extraction compares favorably to using a debugger.
If there wasn't gdb/lldb at all, I'm pretty sure Linux/BSD would have a debugger that's far better than any closed source counterpart.
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Could be because you've never used a good one. I could see how that distaste would form if all you've ever used was the likes of gdb, lldb, of (if you work in Python) pdb. But when I was switching away from Windows entirely 15 years ago, giving up windbg and Visual Studio debugger was HARD. It's so convenient when you can just _see_ what your program is doing without a lot of extra friction. The downside is, this very much disincentives the writing of tests, because you can get non-trivial pieces of code working without any tests. But with a little self-discipline, I think having a great debugger was a net positive for me, both code quality and productivity-wise.
Throughout my career, I have never met anyone who used MS tools that did not find them excellent and productivity enhancing. In fact I could probably add to MS any of the language vendors from years ago. I remember using Borlands terminal based C++ environment back in the early 90's. That's about 30 years ago and that environment is better than what I use programming on Linux today.
I have often thought that programmers posture over their tool independence to signal their excellence. Before the current generation of programmers, many programmers would proclaim how they didn't need to use higher level languages to assist them in programming because assembly language was sufficient given their reasoning powers. Today programmers proclaim they don't need types to insure data invariants as their reasoning powers are sufficient. They proclaim they don't get any value from unit testing because they can maintain correctness across all development phases using their reasoning powers alone. They proclaim they don't need automatic garbage collection because they can insure correct memory usage using their reasoning powers. They have no use for IDEs, debuggers, or profilers because they believe none of these tools could augment their reasoning powers.
Excellent programmers can indeed compensate for poor tooling through their reasoning powers alone. But if history is a guide, people who don't use the best tools, practices and technologies to produce the best work, at some point, wont produce the best work.
I think the situation on the FOSS side is compounded by the fact that gdb, while it's unquestionably not in any way "state of the art", is also not totally useless, so there's less of a reason to create something that's truly excellent. Moreover, there are whole generations of programmers now who think that tooth extraction compares favorably to using a debugger.
If there wasn't gdb/lldb at all, I'm pretty sure Linux/BSD would have a debugger that's far better than any closed source counterpart.
Well, cite, please.