You lost me here.
Using a debugger to step through the code is a huge timesaver.
Inserting println statements, compiling, running, inserting more println, and repeating is very inefficient.
If you learn to use a debugger, set breakpoints, and step through code examining values while you go then the 8 seconds spent compiling isn’t an issue.
So like, sure: if I have some trivial one-off analysis tool I am building for which I am running into some issue I could figure out how to debug it, but even then I am going to have to figure out yet another debugging environment for yet another language, and also of course surmount the hassle of a ton of ensuring that sufficient debugging information is available and I'm running a build that is somehow not optimized enough for debugging and yet also not so slow that I'm gouging my eyes out, I could use a debugger, but I'd rather sit and stare at the code longer than start arguing with a debugger.
It's just another wannabe big scale dumbsterfire some big brain architect thought up, thinking he's implementing a platform that's actively being used by millions of users simultaneously, aka Google's or a few social media sites.
That all depends on how long it takes to compile and run.
> If you learn to use a debugger, set breakpoints, and step through code examining values while you go then the 8 seconds spent compiling isn’t an issue.
Meh, it's fine.
You still have to set new ones and re-run your code to trigger the reproduction iteratively if you don't know where anything is wrong.
Clicking "add logging break point here" and adding a print statement is really not very different. In my experience the hard part is know where you want to look. Stepping through all your code line by line and looking at all values every step is not a quick way to do anything. You have to divide and conquer your debugging smartly, like a binary search all over your call sites in the huge tree-walk that is your program.
Debuggers are pretty good when you want to understand someone else's code.
I think a lot of linux/mac folks tend to printf debug, while windows folks tend to use a debugger, and I suspect it is a culture based choice that is justified post hoc.
However, few things have been better for my code than stepping through anything complex at least once before I move on (I used to almost exclusively use printf debugging).
This is too slow and manual of a process to be a huge timesaver, you'd need a "time-travel" debugging capability that eliminate these to save time