Maybe it's just me, but needing an entire IDE or a debugger to write a function that checks if a string is the same backwards seems entirely too much to me. It's a pen&paper question really.
It's not just you. I use Visual Studio when I'm occasionally looking at C#, IntelliJ on the odd occasion that I'm doing Java, and otherwise it's emacs and I can't remember the last time I used a debugger for Go, Elixir, C, C++, JS, Python, Ruby, etc. Basically, unless the language's standard library is massive and over-abstracted, no IDE is necessary. There's no way I'll ever remember org.apache.some.deep.package.HttpClientBuilderFactory and its 6 constructor arguments, but "import requests; requests.get(...)" is pretty easy to write without an IDE.
Id say that close to 0 out off 10 engineers at work including me would get a working program without debugger or print statements.
Just tried in c and got me 2 compiles to get it right. Without the output I would just present a nonworking program.