[stouset]

I am comfortable using a debugger, but println debugging is easy, fast, and disproportionately effective for most of my debugging in practice.

I reach for a “real” debugger when necessary, but that’s less than 5% of the time.

[flohofwoe]

I wonder, do you use a separate debugger, or a debugger that's integrated into your IDE? "Reaching for a debugger" is just pressing F5 in an IDE.

E.g. I keep wondering whether the split between people who can't live without debuggers vs people who rarely use debuggers is actually people who use IDEs versus people who don't.

[hibbelig]

Data point: I develop in Java and I use IntelliJ. I run everything in debug mode. So it’s really easy for me to enter the debugger.

But I find that if I have to step around more than a handful of times to find the issue then I forget what happened five steps ago. So I teach for print debugging quite often.

[stouset]

I use VS Code, and there's an extension that provides a debugger for the languages I use.