While a debugger is of high value, having access to a REPL also covers the major use cases.

In particular, REPL tools will work on remote session, on pre-production servers etc. _if_ the code base is organized in a somewhat modular way, it can be more pleasant than a debugger at times.

Makes me wonder if the state of debugging improved in PHP land. It was mostly unusable for batch process debugging, or when the server memory wasn't infinite, which is kinda the case most of the time for us mere mortals.

I am the author of the posted flamebait. I agree.

I use IPython / JShell REPLs often when the code is not finished and I have to call a random function without entrypoint.

In fact its possible to jump to the graphical debugger from the Python REPL when running locally. PyCharm has this feature natively. In VSCode you can use a simple workaround like this: https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/posts/vscode-ipython-debuggin...