I find it depends on the language, too. Some make debugging a little harder, but are so easy to mess with (REPL or similar), that printing is sufficient and eas

I find it depends on the language, too. Some make debugging a little harder, but are so easy to mess with (REPL or similar), that printing is sufficient and easier 95%+ of the time. Some languages invite sufficient complexity that you need to actually step through most code written in them...and they also offer the facilities to do so fairly easily. So I'd say this really depends on the language.