title: Why aren't students taught to use a debugger?
body: <p>There's <em>a lot</em> of homework questions here on SO.</p>
  
  <p>I would guess that 90%+ can be solved by stepping through the code in a debugger, and observing program/variable state.</p>
  
  <p>I was never taught to use a debugger.  I simply printed and read the GDB manual and stepped through their examples.  When I used Visual Studio for the first time, I remembered thinking, Wow! how much simpler can this be, click to set a breakpoint, mouse over a variable for the value, press a key to step, the immediate window, debug.print, etc...</p>
  
  <p>At any rate, are students "taught" to use a debugger?  If not, why not?  (Perhaps a better question is, why can't they learn to use a debugger themselves... maybe they need to be <em>told</em> that there is such a tool that can help them...)</p>
  
  <p>How long does it take to learn to use a debugger?</p>