I am pretty much with you @jtravs, I am coming from C++ and plain terminals. The gdb debugger was my last resource when I couldn’t figure out the issue by just reasoning through the code and printing out intermediate values of computation.
After you do this exercise for a while, you learn how to find bugs systematically and efficiently. You become a better programmer as well. In fact, if you have the habit of writing tests for every feature you add to your library, a debugger is almost useless.
I think you are right that people are used to jump straight to a Visual Studio or MATLAB debugger, and are somewhat dependent on a tool that should be used on exceptional cases only.