James Robertson: “People underestimate the importance of this a lot. In fact, you can find plenty of developers (including Rubyists) who will tell you that you shouldn’t debug at all; tests will do it all for you. What that really means is this: debuggers in other languages are very, very different from what we have in Smalltalk, and when you get into Seaside, it’s even more cool”
This is one of the things that bugs me about most web development. You don’t have a great debugger and folks that say you don’t need one are kidding themselves. Debuggers are great for more than actual debugging of code. You can use them to figure out the flow of your code, stepping through it to force code paths, and the like.
If I were to become a full time web developer Smalltalk would be on a very short list of choices because its’ maturity.