One of the big benefits of print debugging is that it's useful for the initial "bifurcate the code" process. If you add a bunch of print statements every few l

One of the big benefits of print debugging is that it's useful for the initial "bifurcate the code" process. If you add a bunch of print statements every few lines, it's easier to run the code and see you got to the checkpoint line 1580 and 1587 but not 1601, than to have to manually click through a dozen breakpoints and note the last one you passed before the problem occurs. If you have a "hard crash" where you can give a stack trace, that's less of a need, but often it's something like "this value was 125 when it entered module Foo and came back as 267". Monitoring the expression can sometimes help, but it might also be a red herring (we trap that it got set at the end of function Bar, but then we have to dig into function Bar to find the trace). Printfs can include whatever combination of values are worth reporting at any time. Yes, any debugger can do all of that, but when trying to spin it up ad-hoc, printfs can be less hassle than trying to pull up the debugging tools and wire it up inside the IDE.