[setopt]

I have more or less the same experience like you. Logging is a very resilient and adaptable technique – I can use it on my laptop or on remote HPC clusters, almost regardless of programming language (except maybe Haskell), it works fine on parallelized code, and so on, with very little configuration needed. It’s also important to me that it can be done “async”, since some of my larger codes can only be run on HPC clusters by putting a job in a process queue and waiting.

I’ve tried debuggers and see the appeal but I find it less useful than print debugging / logging.

I also rely heavily on unit tests when writing new code, so that also reduces the surface that I need to look for bugs based on the log. Moreover, most of my projects have 1-3 programmers and can largely “fit in my head” (<10,000 lines of code), so it’s probably different if you work at a FAANG company or something.

[coliveira]

I think you have a great point here. Debugging tools make you dependent on a particular environment. Printing based debugging can work pretty much everywhere. If you master printf programming you can solve any debugging task.

[schmidtleonard]

Yes, portability and simplicity are the best parts of printf.

> If you master printf

The skill ceiling is low. Printf only does so much.

You could rope in environmental optimization to the skill discussion -- the ability to isolate areas of functionality, replicate problems, reason about unknown state, and do the legwork so that you can quickly spin the increased amount of iteration required by a simpler debugging tool -- but by then you have thoroughly sacrificed both simplicity and portability and are far past the skill floor of a debugger.

If we assess this by looking for problems created by overcommitting to one approach or another, overcommitting to a debugger looks like burning time trying to get tooling to work on a problem that doesn't really need it while overcommitting to printf looks like spending way too much time iterating on tiny steps that could have been jumped over given better visibility. I've seen both, of course, but I tend to see more of the latter and more denial about the latter. When you're burning time fighting tools it's obvious. When you're burning time because you don't know how a tool could have saved you time, it's less obvious.

YMMV.

[PontifexMinimus]

> the ability to isolate areas of functionality

This is the key. You need to be able to narrow down where the bug is.