Let me just replace debugger with supermarket. Hopefully you will see how this is a stupid argument :
One of the insidious things about supermarkets is that they let you be lazy when getting food. When you don't have a supermarket, you need to be more careful about what you do and really understand your food, because a misstep when collecting food can take lead to death. With a bunch of safety nets at hand, you feel like you can just blow out and get some food and work it out via diets later.
There's no doubt that better tools have let us be more productive, but in the process we understand the food we eat less deeply than we otherwise would, because we are required to spend less time contemplating it.
Now do the same replacement for compilers, as they seriously lower programmer's understanding of what happens in their program. Operating systems, because they prevent most programmers from knowing how they're using hardware resources, and therefore lead to suboptimal resource usage.
It's absolutely true what's being stated here. Yet when you apply it to anything else it shows it's utter stupidity. Without tools we are less, it's as simple as that. Doesn't particularly matter what tool you're talking about, debuggers or supermarkets or cars.
Let me tell you the one advantage that producing throwaway "software" that is 3 page webpages, at most, with 2-3 features. The one property this has is that it's cheaper. Due to a horrific accident of history it has an easy and mostly idiot-proof distribution system it also pays more.
I would also like to point out that when desktop apps were the norm, and an environment without debuggers just simply didn't exist, desktop software was large bodies of code where you could fill books with their feature list. In fact people did [1]. Today a webpage with 5 screens is considered a lot. Not doing massive code reuse was considered lunacy, where now nobody does it.
But let's not kid ourselves. Software 10 years ago beat the crap out of webpages and android apps in features, documentation, ... everything.
It's absolutely true what's being stated here. Yet when you apply it to anything else it shows it's utter stupidity. Without tools we are less, it's as simple as that. Doesn't particularly matter what tool you're talking about, debuggers or supermarkets or cars.
Let me tell you the one advantage that producing throwaway "software" that is 3 page webpages, at most, with 2-3 features. The one property this has is that it's cheaper. Due to a horrific accident of history it has an easy and mostly idiot-proof distribution system it also pays more.
I would also like to point out that when desktop apps were the norm, and an environment without debuggers just simply didn't exist, desktop software was large bodies of code where you could fill books with their feature list. In fact people did [1]. Today a webpage with 5 screens is considered a lot. Not doing massive code reuse was considered lunacy, where now nobody does it.
But let's not kid ourselves. Software 10 years ago beat the crap out of webpages and android apps in features, documentation, ... everything.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/CorelDRAW-X6-The-Official-Guide/dp/007...