I agree. Though writing my assignments for a C course was made so much easier thanks to Xcode and the ability to quickly view what's in memory at a breakpoint. Sadly, the course never mentioned debuggers -- likely as a way to weed out students. I suspect this has changed since, but it's up to the prof, so who knows. Part of it is that few profs understand the practical reasons to favour some tools over others -- if you don't write the code day in and day out, you won't know which tools to recommend when. I think maybe there's room for a "practice of programming" course on methodology, tools and open source licensing.
