Balance is the key, but if I only had a debugger, and not the printf option, I'd be working more slowly and swearing a bit more. I work in a natural science, a

Balance is the key, but if I only had a debugger, and not the printf option, I'd be working more slowly and swearing a bit more. I work in a natural science, and use computing for numerical simulations and data analyses. For coding problems, a debugger is pretty handy. But for finding errors in the underlying mathematics, I tend to rely on a printf -> grep -> analysis chain. This might make files of several hundred Mb in size. The last part is generally done in R, because that lets me apply graphical and statistical methods to discover problematic conditions. Often these conditions do not crop up for quite a long time, and my task will be to find out just what I did wrong, with something like a problematic formulation of boundary condition that created an anomalous signal near an edge of a domain, but only once a signal had propagated from a forcing zone into that region of state space.