are all these fancy IDEs with more and more features really making use better at debugging or are they just doing the work for us and causing us to forget how to really debug?


This thought came to me today because I've been doing some low-level ASM and I've came across a problem where I'm getting an Address error but I can't find the line its on. My ASM skills are limited to start with but as far as I can tell the code is right. To try and aid me I was trying to figure out what line the error is happening on. I tried running through the code instruction at a time to see when the error happened however I can input data while its in that mode so it doesn't get to the error. I then figured if only I could find a IDE which would allow me to run though the code line by line, skipping out the compile stage and just having the IDE emulate it (Pretty advanced for a ASM IDE).
Then it dawned on me that if I really knew ASM I wouldn't need that kind of thing and is that the same case when it comes to other high level languages like people learning C++ now in the .NET IDE have more features than the VC++6 one and are they lacking the skills at debugging because of this?

As an example people who programmed back the the days before IDEs (i.e. Marty ) and just text editors will probably be better at debugging because they grow up just looking at the code to figure out what was wrong, instead of just hovering the mouse over your variables and it working everything out for you.