[alexandernst]

I'm still not entirely sure why, in plain 2020, PHP seems to be the only language missing a debugger able to run in a shell.

Python, Ruby, Javascript and others have a "debugger;" statement of some sort that, when hit by the execution flow, will pause the code and let you type stuff in your shell, letting you inspect the code, step forward, etc...

Why does PHP need me to configure an entire IDE or my browser? (I'm looking at you, xdebug). Why can't it have a cli-debugger?