[razorfen]

ITT: a non-controversial opinion shared by most programmers.

Print debugging is fast in many cases and requires little mental overhead to get going.

But for some/many systems, there's a huge startup and cooldown time for their applications - and compiling in a print, deploying the service, and then running through the steps necessary to recreate a bug is a non-trivial exercise. Think remote debugging of a deployed system with a bug that requires select network and data states that are hard or impossible to replicate in local/dev.

For things like this, being able to isolate the exact point of breakage by stepping through deployed code, and doing immediate evaluation at various points to interrogate state can't be beat.

This post strikes me as either (a) a younger programmer who still thinks that tool choice is a war rather than different tools for different jobs (b) someone making a limp effort at stoking controversy for attention.

[DangitBobby]

> I should emphatically mention: I’m not saying that print debugging is the best end state for debugging tools, far from it. I’m just saying that we should reflect deeply on why print debugging is so popular, beyond mere convenience, and incorporate those lessons into new tools.

I'm not sure what about the article makes you think either a or b. They are trying to critically examine why some people reach for print debugging first, and I think it's spot on.

[tyingq]

Probably explains why java has such a rich set of logging and debugging tools. Startup time, plus the idea that printing to stderr/stdout doesn't help you figure out where that goes in many java environments :)

[jollybean]

Or c) someone just making comments from observed experience, and there's not much about that 'senior developers' have when it comes to 'having had to compile something that takes a while' - that's the purview of everyone, or at least, those who have worked on those larger projects. And though remotely debugging code definitely happens, it's in relative terms, very rare. This is just someone making a comment on their blog, that's it.

[CJefferson]

On the other hand, when you are working in an example like you are discussing (a service, or multiple services, which must all be deployed), it can be hard to figure out how to get the debugger attached.

It possible depends on the kind of programming you do -- I find myself doing little bits of work on projects in many languages, so learning how to get the debugger going often takes longer than finding + fixing the bug.

[diminish]

In languages where you build a deeply nested call stack, advanced debugging looks more promissing. But in simpler setups like ASP/PHP/JSP etc, simply printing works fine.