Hacker News Reader

Their comment conflates debugging with logging.

Professional debuggers such as the one in IntelliJ IDEA are invaluable regardless of one's familiarity with a given codebase, to say otherwise is utter ignorance. Outside of logging, unless attaching a debugger is impractical, using print statements is at best wasting time.

View on HN

Perhaps consider that your experience is not universal and that others have good reasons for their decisions that are not simply ignorance.

I didn't say there aren't acceptable reasons to reach for the print statement, there are. But for the vast majority of codebases out there, if good debugger tooling is available, it's a crime not to use it as a primary diagnostics tool. Claiming otherwise is indeed ignorant if not irresponsible.

Debugging is for the developer; logging is for all, and especially those who need to support the code without the skills/setup/bandwidth to drop into a debugger. Once you start paying attention to what/where/how of logging, you (and others) can spot things faster then you can step through the debugger. Plus logs provide history and and searchable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com