[klyrs]

> in pycharm [0] you can even execute your print statements in the debugger if you so wish

In my experience, debuggers are really good to expose hidden control flow. But usually, I know the flow, and using a debugger for human-in-the-middle print statements is just going to slow me down. Worse, those print statements are ephemeral, so I'm disinclined to write a nice formatter.

Print debugging leverages the language -- want to print in a certain condition? Easy. Have a recursive structure, an array, or a graph that you need to investigate? A naked print sucks, a custom formatter is great. Need to check some preconditions/postconditions? Do that in code. Don't try to check that stuff by hand in the debugger.

Speaking personally... the only thing I like about icecream is that ic(foo) both prints and returns foo, because you can inject it into code basically for free. But I already have a solution to that:

  def ic(x): print(x); return x