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I'm of a similar vintage, and I found debuggers valuable when I was debugging Windows 3x and 9x programs, C or MFC C++. You needed to get in to the data structures in memory sometimes, and Microsoft made good debuggers at the time.

Modern development, scripting languages and web development, I rarely use a debugger, setting it up for each of the various languages we jump to is too much bother.

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I am in a similar boat - When I was an engineer at Intel during the Windows NT days, I used SoftICE every day... but over time I have evolved into using less debugger tools and more emulation/simulation tools to find problems.. and even just more time 'thinking' about the code paths and what could go wrong.

FWIW, I'm talking about C++ multi-threaded code for Linux (server software with high variety of requests and work flows).

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