Another thing I think leads people to print debugging - which is both a strength and a weakness of the approach: It minimises the mental effort to get to the n

Another thing I think leads people to print debugging - which is both a strength and a weakness of the approach: It minimises the mental effort to get to the next potential clue. And programmers are naturally drawn to that because: 1. True focus is a limited resource, so it's usually a good strategy to do the mentally laziest thing at each stage if you're facing a hard problem. 2. It always feels like the next time might be it - the final clue. But these can lead to a trap when you don't quickly converge on an answer and end up in a cycle of waiting for compilation repeatedly whilst not making progress.