Earlier quoted context omitted.
That note always struck me as pride in self flagellation. Having been around many talented kernel developers, most are perfectly happy with a debugger or any other tool they can use to debug something.
> pride in Not really: the linked text shows it is a costly strategy to avoid later «self flagellation»: it is meant to avoid the practice of mindless coding - of overly fast feature insertion, blowing amounts of low quality code to maintain. Torvalds: « I'd rather not work with people who aren't careful ». Also: « I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a d…
At no point has anyone suggested using the debugger in lieu of understanding what the program does and that’s a pure strawman. Understanding is step 0. Once you’ve done that piece, a debugger levels up your game. Same with other tools like profilers, printf debugging, EBPF debugging, etc. Hell, even simple things like executing the code in the first place / running tests / gathering metrics is a debugging tool. It’s rare that someone stares at a difficult bug until they see the matrix. It usually involves iteration cycles of some kind to test out different hypothesis / collect data and a debugger is one tool to speed up those iteration cycles.
There was a story on HN a while back about how one of the inventors of Ethernet had to hook up oscilloscopes to figure out what the electrical signal was doing to figure out why CSMA wasn’t working properly. An oscilloscope is an analog debugger and you can’t tell me that the inventor of Ethernet didn’t understand Ethernet or that the oscilloscope hampered that in any way, especially since the bug turned out to be very nuanced with a chip generating a spike switching modes.