I think print debugging is a symptom of an underlying problem. There is nothing bad about print debugging, there is no reason to avoid it if that's what works

I think print debugging is a symptom of an underlying problem. There is nothing bad about print debugging, there is no reason to avoid it if that's what works with your workflow and tools. The real question is why you are using print and not something else. In particular, what print does better than your purpose-built debugger? If the debugger doesn't get used, maybe one should look down on that particular tool and think of ways of addressing the problem. I see many comments against print debugging that go around the lines of "if you learn to use a proper debugger, that's so much better". But in many modern languages that's actually the problem, you have to invest a lot of time and effort on something that should be intuitive. I remember when I started learning programming, with QBasic, Turbo Pascal, etc... using the debugger was the default, and so intuitive I used a debugger before even knowing what a debugger was! And it was 90s tech, now we have time travel debugging, hot reloading, and way more capable UIs, but for some reason, things got worse, not better. Though I don't know much about it, it seems the only ones who get it right are in the video game industry. The rest tend to be stuck with primitive print debugging. And I say "primitive" not because print debugging is bad in general, but because if print debugging was really to be embraced, it could be made better. For example by having dedicated debug print functions, an easy way to access and print the stack trace, generic object print, pretty printers, overrides for accessing internal data, etc... Some languages already have some of that, but often stopping short of making print debugging first class. Also, it requires fast compilation times.