[AngryParsley]

Agreed.

Logs are good. They're effective. They're easy to use. You can filter, search, and aggregate them. Without printf()s and log statements, my world would be chaos and darkness.

But a debugger gives you superpowers:

  break blah.c:180
  run
  thread apply all bt

You can stop time. You can get backtraces. You can see and modify every aspect of the process. Many debuggers even let you attach to a running process and do these things.

Changing log statements means stopping and re-running your program. If startup time is large, this can hurt productivity.

It's rare, but logs can mislead. With async stuff, logs don't always get printed out in the right order (hello, Node.js and Twisted). A debugger is crucial for figuring out that sort of unintuitive behavior.

[mbq]

There are Node.js debuggers? Oh, seems so: http://github.com/dannycoates/node-inspector

[AngryParsley]

Node has a built-in debugger. Just run `node debug blah.js`. There are some issues with it though. The commands are different from any other debugger, and it has problems handling signals: https://github.com/joyent/node/issues/3167