Here's a wild assertion about why some programmers - some good programmers - prefer printfs: good programmers prefer to solve problems only once, rather than re

Here's a wild assertion about why some programmers - some good programmers - prefer printfs: good programmers prefer to solve problems only once, rather than repeatedly. When you have a question you want to answer about the state of a program, a debugger gives you powerful tools to answer your questions right now, but doesn't leave any permanent record of your investigation. Each time you subsequently want the answer to that same question you have to run the program, hit that breakpoint again, and cast whatever incantations are necessary to reveal the relevant program state. If you used printfs instead, you would probably have had to iterate a few times to get the answer the first time; first you print one thing, then another, moving your prints around until they tell you what you want to know. When you're done, though, you've probably left some log output hanging around. So after you're done investigating, say, how the data access layer works, you have something to cross reference while you're poking around the user interface code. I think this is a more useful technique for unfamiliar source. Comprehending a large hunk of source typically requires integrating your understanding of several sections of code ranging widely across the codebase. Anyway - a good debugger is a wonderful thing. I can't stand up straight sometimes for leaning on them, though.