[marktangotango]

This idea that debugging with print statements is superior to using a debugger is simply false. Learn to use the debugger for your platform it will pay huge dividends throughout your career.

I regularly see pais+ of println debuggers debate and speculate while the guy with the debugger drills straight down to the issue, and fixes it.

[nayuki]

I think it is a fallacy to choose either printing or debugging. I forgot where I read this, but the two techniques are fundamentally different. A debugger lets you stop execution and examine data structures at one point in time. Printing lets you accumulate a log of one particular data structure over a span of time. I think these techniques are complementary and have different effectiveness on different problems.

[heavenlyblue]

Yep. They call it “tracing” in debugging and a good debugger will be able to directly catch and log the values of any variable at a particular line of code.

By using logging instead you’re reimplementing years of good work done by engineers before you.