It's often much faster to just print or dump some data to screen just to see where your assumptions have gone wrong. There's a point at which some bugs become

It's often much faster to just print or dump some data to screen just to see where your assumptions have gone wrong. There's a point at which some bugs become more complex, or just aren't easily figured out from this method, but it's surprisingly quick and powerful when used in conjunction with a language in which doing so is quick and easy. Doing it in a project that requires a few minutes or more just to build can quickly change this equation, but this is my go-to initial method for debugging problems. Then again, it's generally pretty easy for me since I develop with liberal use of debug messages and dumping of data structures at multiple locations depending on the value of the DEBUG environment variable. In production I just run without a DEBUG environment prefix and nobody is bothered by the verboseness, but if there's a problem, step one is generally just doing a test run with DEBUG=3 or something prefixing the command. It's a bit different for web-based scripts like in PHP, but not much so (just make it a param), as long as STDERR goes to a log file.