slamb responds to my post on debuggers, and distinguishes between the different ways in which debuggers can be used.

I agree. In my previous post, I was referring to debuggers as tools for single stepping a running program, inspecting data, setting breakpints and watchpoints, etc. When programming in C and C++, I did use debuggers as slamb describes: for obtaining stack traces upon segfaults. But in the last couple of years, the majority of my development has been in Java, where exception stack traces make use of a debugger for this purpose unnecessary. And before that, when I was mostly programming in C, I implemented a simple stack trace facility, a bit like the glibc libSegFault or the Linux kernel Oops reports, and used it in a few projects (multithreaded programs, since at that time on Linux, threads and gdb did not mix well, and multithreaded core files did not work at all).

So I was referring to debuggers in a particular sense, but in my defence, I think the same sense was used in the articles which I linked to.