How is a unix shell going to help me debug the internals of my C program? You can use gdb from a terminal of course (yet another giant single program, funny how many of those I use every day…) but it's much more of a pain than a real REPL.
I noticed in another comment you said you are just learning C, perhaps you should wait till you have written non-trivial C before you declare what tools one does or does not need when writing it? C makes it very easy to make very nasty mistakes, so personally I take all the help I can get. I guess this means you think I'm an awful developer (according to your recent anti-IDE blog post), but I'd rather have code with less bugs than worry about violating some notion of 'purity' or hacker-hardcorness.
I noticed in another comment you said you are just learning C, perhaps you should wait till you have written non-trivial C before you declare what tools one does or does not need when writing it? C makes it very easy to make very nasty mistakes, so personally I take all the help I can get. I guess this means you think I'm an awful developer (according to your recent anti-IDE blog post), but I'd rather have code with less bugs than worry about violating some notion of 'purity' or hacker-hardcorness.