Similarly my jaw dropped when people in 5th years were amazed at Eclipse's debugger. They never used one before.
While I respect their opinion I feel that pushing people into a difficult environment immediately will better their develop their confidence for future situations like this. It's all to often that I encounter fellow students who are "afraid" to attempt to use tools, algorithms, language features, etc because they haven't been trained in their usage.
As someone who taught myself to program that's pure crazy talk.
If you print values you get a debugging log which (for me) is often more helpful, because I can easier map it to the offending code line.
But it's good to have both tools available.