The reason the 'printf debugging' might be so prevalent is the professors as well. I got told "printf debugging is incredibly useful, so in this class you can o

The reason the 'printf debugging' might be so prevalent is the professors as well. I got told "printf debugging is incredibly useful, so in this class you can only use printf debugging to debug your program" in one of my classes. We also were to compile everything using Make and could only use Vi. It was still a good class, but maybe that's why so many students think they HAVE to debug with printf.