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Conditional break points are definitely a great secret weapon. But don't underestimate the value of the humble print statement. It's convenient and can often lead to surprising insights "hmm, why is this getting printed so damned much?" in a way that is sometimes more accessible than a debugger.

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This right here, print statement debugging gets far more of a bad name than it deserves. If that's a developers only tool then sure that's a problem, but no need to hate on a very simple and effective technique just because it's often the only one people know when they are starting out.

Print debugging results in a printed log of this happened, then this happened, ..., and finally this happened. And you can trivially rewind it and do random looks at the log. Debuggers have difficulty giving you this much context at your fingertips. The downside is that if you missed one of those critical "this happened" items in your log you have to rerun. But debuggers have the same problem. If you missed a breakpoint you have to re-run.

Intellij’s debugger has a ‘drop frame’ feature that i use a lot for going back in time when i missed something.

It also shows you the state of variables at various points alongside the code, which is basically the context i want to log anyways.

You can make breakpoints that just print stuff (at least in Visual Studio)

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