To paraphrase Jaynes, philosophers can say anything they want, because they don't have to do anything right.

The magic of coding, or in general creating something that does something, is that reality tests your ideas. Oh yeah, and you actually accomplish something outside of your head, or the heads of others at a cocktail party.

Coding is great in that the turnaround time for testing your ideas is so fast. The faster the feedback loop, the faster the learning.

Although the OP mentioned debugging, I'd stress and elaborate the point for people just learning to program. He says programming forces you to think. Particularly when you're learning, or debugging, I'd say sometimes you need to stop trying to figure it out, and start just trying things out. Fiddle with it and see what happens. That's the way to improve your model of how it works, so that next time you will have a better sense of what to do.