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I've tried the interactive debuggers but I'm yet to find a situation where they worked better than just printing. I use an interactive console to test what stuff does, but inline in the app I've never had anything that printing wasn't the straightforward fast solution.

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I'm not above the old print here or there but the value of an interactive debugger is being able to step and inspect the state of variables at all the different call sites, for instance.

it's genuinely embarassing that the printf() diehards in this thread are not clear on this detail.

I’m only found them to be useful in gargantuan OOP piles where the context is really hard to keep in your head and getting to any given point in execution can take minutes. In those cases interactive debugging has been invaluable.

I guess that’s the difference. I do rails dev mostly and it’s just put a print statement in, then run the unit test. It’s a fast feedback loop.

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