[BrissyCoder]

As always with these kinds of dogamtic posts it ignores the real world: working on years old legacy software with millions of lines of code and off-the-charts cyclomatic-complexity.

I could show anyone of these authorities a situation where their bravado would fail a trying to figure out a particular bug by "staring at the code and thinking harder" would be impossible.

Besides - they all tend to concede that they will use print statements or whatever as a last resorted. That is just retarded - you have to add the statements, recompile the code, and eventually remove them again. Just use the goddamn debugger that's what it's there for.

What starts as a completely reasonable "hey maybe sometimes you should try to read the code and not let the debugger become a crutch" turns into a sensationalist black/white statement "I NEVER USE A DEBUGGER". Grow up.

[deergomoo]

I’ve never understood the “I don’t need a debugger - print statements are fine” argument. Even if you only use a debugger to view application state, (which, for most debuggers, is but a tiny fraction of their capability) it’s still an order of magnitude more convenient than print statements.

No need to modify code, and no risk of forgetting to remove a print statement (I have seen a forgotten dump on a rare execution path leak sensitive data to users first hand). Not to mention the cases where printing can change or break the program in some cases; for example printing before sending headers in something like PHP.