This is one of the main things which has driven the development of julia's logging system; it seems that some people just don't like debuggers very much (I'm one of them) and find staring at logs and attempting to run the code in their head to be a productive alternative.
I think it's the difference between inspecting local vs global program behavior. A debugger gives a very local view of the program but the most difficult bugs are ones where the local behavior is (or seems) correct but the global behavior is wrong. In that case it can be much more useful to run the program to completion with plenty of logging and then to carefully inspect the record of how the state changed.
