[mkdirp]

You'd think. But I still see discussions in JavaScript and PHP related threads where people swear by adding `console.log`/`var_dump` statements to their code over using the debugger.

I've seen quite a few threads on r/php where individuals introduce a newer, supposedly better, library that can be used instead of `var_dump`, and there's always the inevitable "why not use the debugger?" to which many reply "because it's hard to set up" or "var_dump is better" or something silly to that effect.

[charcircuit]

Logging has the benefit of not stopping your programs. On what I work on stopping the program is not feasible. It will block all of the clients trying to communicate with it and if you pause for too long the clients will disconnect and this may make the problem hard to reproduce. Additionally it can be difficult to attach a debugger on a remote machine compared to deploying a simple update which mechanisms already exist for doing.

[mkdirp]

Logging is not debugging/print statements.

You also wouldn't generally be debugging a request from random clients. You'd generally be debugging in your local dev environment.

[ehnto]

Which is strange, because debugging in JS and PHP is almost trivial to setup. Perhaps less so in PHP, but for JS it's right there in the browser for client side code.

[nicoburns]

JS is super straightforward until you're transpiling from a newer version of JS or from TypeScript and debugging is supported via source maps (which tends to be most JavaScript codebases). At that point, the debugging experience is pretty hit and miss. When it works it's fantastic, but it doesn't always work.

[bruce343434]

For sure not trivial with php

[ehnto]

It is pretty easy to locally or remotely debug with xDebug, the docs are pretty straight forward. What makes it difficult I find is when you're trying to use it in weird VMs.