[zb]

Debuggers allow you inspect stuff forward in time, while print statements allow you to debug backwards. (There was a lot of academic work on reversible debuggers at one point; to be honest I haven’t kept up on how that turned out.)

If you can detect a problematic condition and you want to know what will happen next, a debugger is a great tool.

If you can detect a problematic condition and you need to find out what caused it, it’s printf all the way.

My theory is that different types of programming encounter these two types of problems at different relative rates, and that this explains why many people strongly prefer one over the other but don’t agree on which.