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Comment by gregjor | Hacker News Reader

If you feel shame because of random opinions and articles on the internet, I’d address that before worrying about “print” vs. a real debugger.

I pretty much only use print debugging. I know how to use a real debugger but adding print/console.log etc. keeps me from breaking context and flow.

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I only use print debugging when working on the web, and your mention of console.log makes me think maybe you're in the same boat.

It's an absolutely damning indictment of the developer experience for the web that this is the case. Why aren't our IDEs and browsers beautifully integrated like every other development environment I use integrates the runtime and the IDE?

Why hasn't some startup, somewhere, fixed this and the rest of the web dev hellscape? I don't know.

Don't browsers have some of the best dev tools out there? For example, you can use the `debugger`[0] statement in your JS code to trigger the in-browser debugger when that statement is hit (its basically setting a breakpoint).

0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

That's table stakes for a programming language these days I think.

JS: debugger;

C#: System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Break();

Rust: std::intrinsics::breakpoint();

Go: runtime.Breakpoint();

Zig: @breakpoint();

Agreed, but I wonder what the OP is missing in their webdev debugging journey that exists elsewhere

Browser debugging tools are very basic. Their UI is generally awful.

Spend a few days debugging in PyCharm and you'll scream when you open developer tools.

I have always used print debugging, since way before web dev existed. I resort to an actual debugger only occasionally.

Some IDEs do have integrated JS runtimes, so you can use a debugger in the IDE. However since JS runs on browsers and devices out of your control that only works up to a point.

Even printing can have some side effects on the code, by introducing some extra latency that might implicitly fix a race condition, if that’s the bug in question. Not saying that it’s wrong, just funny to think about that race conditions are hard to debug with any kind of tool, either with debugger or printing.

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