2 other quotes:

Q: "If you were young again, would you start writing TeX again or would you use Microsoft Word, or another word processor?" A: "I hope to die before I have to use Microsoft Word." —Harald Koenig asking Donald Knuth, Tübingen, 2001 Oct 2.

"The most important thing in the programming language is the name. A language will not succeed without a good name. I have recently invented a very good name and now I am looking for a suitable language."

I saw Knuth talk at Kepler's Bookstore in Menlo Park some years ago. Someone asked him which language was better Java or C++. He replied: "Whichever has the better debugger".

Now _that_ is wisdom. It's the tooling that's important, of which the language is only one part.

Are most debuggers now equivalent nowadays?

All I need it to do is set breakpoints and inspect variable/memory values.

No, they aren't. With Java you can change code while the application is running and it will be hot-swapped after you have recompiled it.

I learned about this feature when playing a bit in Eclipse, forgot to kill the program between edits, and got a warning that the recompiled class couldn't be hot-swapped because its signature changed. And then I sat there in awe; I can just dream about this functioning reliably with C++.

Microsoft Visual C++ supported "Edit and Continue" for many many years.

I remember using this in MSVC 6 - so at least 14 years ago.

"Supports", "works" and "is usable" are three totally different things. I doubt that E&C is truly usable since even much simpler things -- for example, data breakpoints when debugging native+managed code -- is unsupported in VS2010. (Needed exactly that today.) E&C is disabled also for C# as soon as you turn on native-code debugging.

Edit & continue is available with the V8 engine as well, so add JavaScript to the list of languages being unrighteously ignored.

"The most important thing in the kitchen is the waste paper basket and it needs to be centrally located. - Donald Knuth"

This is so true. It also applies in any factory and any construction site and any dorm-room.