I really like this explanation of the Smalltalk debugger - especially since it comes from a new Smalltalker, not one of us arrogant jerks from "back in the day" :). Ben Matasar offers this:

I think the name debugger gives people the wrong idea about what it is, at least in Smalltalk. When I first came to Smalltalk in December of last year I tried not to use the debugger, and I did think of it as a crutch. Now I use it all the time to get my bearings around a codebase. In fact, I write quite a bit of my code directly in the debugger, often with my web browser spinning in the background waiting for me to send the response.

I now think of it as a method context browser, where you have an active REPL at every step of the call stack. This is nice because you can send messages to the objects, to poke them and figure out how they're going to respond to messages.

Remember that most of coding is reading other people's code. Ask yourself this: is that code more understandable on its own, or in its proper context?

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