Jonathan HoggI’m sure the Astral tools are all very useful but, controversial opinion here, my preferred way to debug Python code is by reading and understanding it…
David MankinsKnuth wrote an essay called something like “The bugs of TeX”, that opened with, “On June XX, 197x, I finished writing TeX. The next morning, I began to single step it using the excellent debugger written by ….”
And I thought, “Whoa. Don Knuth single-stepped TeX. Well, if it’s good enough for Knuth, it’s good enough for me.”
And ever since, often the first execution of a program I write takes place in the debugger, one statement at a time.
(With exceptions for Lisp, where single-stepping is an alien concept, so I try to keep my functions short enough that Tony Hoare’s maxim of “Obviously no flaws instead of no obvious flaws” applies.)