By way of background, I'm older than a lot of people here (42) and have been programming since the 1980's. Programming is a hobby for me after I got my law degr

By way of background, I'm older than a lot of people here (42) and have been programming since the 1980's. Programming is a hobby for me after I got my law degree. I still use print statements for debugging because they work - by now, I've switched primary languages three times (BASIC -> Turbo Pascal -> C -> Python) and development environments way too many times to count. I remember when IDE's were new. My point is not that IDE's suck (they're pretty nice, really) but that unless I'm deep in a project, the time it takes to learn the ins & outs of the debugger/IDE environment probably won't lead to a net increase in productivity. Also, IDE development is more complicated where the code is running on a server somewhere else. I work interactively in the Python interpreter when testing/experimenting and then use vi to work on the real code.