In my experience, people who champion printf debugging usually don’t have the option to use an effective debugger. Low-tooling embedded or distributed systems f

In my experience, people who champion printf debugging usually don’t have the option to use an effective debugger. Low-tooling embedded or distributed systems for example. Many others champion “you should understand your own code well enough that you don’t need a debugger”. Those people are usually in an unusual situation where they can work on a small bit of code in a small/solo team for a very long time. Meanwhile, much of my career has been spent stepping through code I’ve never seen before and will never see again trying to fix bugs that span multiple teams and external libraries.