[jerf]

"Proper logging > debugger."

I assume that statement refers to the amount of noise in question?

Sure, print statements are my normal tool, but often I'm working on transforming one data structure into another (compiler-style) and I'm encountering an error "somewhere" down in the middle. After the first few megabytes of logging output get generated, you start to really lose the thread of what's going on.

It depends on what you're doing. If you're a CRUD programmer, yeah, I can see how they'd be useless; that's a good deal of my job too and I don't use them then. But when I'm actually doing something interesting and twisty I often need them, if only to set some conditional breakpoints somewhere so I can get into the middle of a complicated process instead of trying to reconstruct the state later.

Also they are great for learning libraries by stepping through them.