I feel like the author gets close to the point but fails to drive it home: step-through debugging is
unbelievably cumbersome. During a typical step-through debugging session, 90% of the time is spent on lines you are completely not interested in. Oh, did you accidentally skip the important point because of how tedious it was to keep spamming step-over/step-in? Better start over again. With print debugging, you set up your print statements strategically and -zing-, you get your results back. Feedback loop shorter. 100% of the lines are the ones you are interested in, because you put the print statements there.
I'm still waiting for the feature where you can conditionally stop at some breakpoint -only- if some other breakpoint/watchpoint was crossed over. It's not a conditional breakpoint, because conditional breakpoints can only watch variables, not other breakpoints. You could of course set some variable depending on whether some section was entered and then conditionally break based on that variable. But then you're back to print debugging land, having to manually insert code in order debug the program.
Debuggers are superior when it comes to interrogating the exact state of some variables, as well as the decision paths the program takes. For anything simpler, print debugging simply offers the better developer experience.
I'm still waiting for the feature where you can conditionally stop at some breakpoint -only- if some other breakpoint/watchpoint was crossed over. It's not a conditional breakpoint, because conditional breakpoints can only watch variables, not other breakpoints. You could of course set some variable depending on whether some section was entered and then conditionally break based on that variable. But then you're back to print debugging land, having to manually insert code in order debug the program.
Debuggers are superior when it comes to interrogating the exact state of some variables, as well as the decision paths the program takes. For anything simpler, print debugging simply offers the better developer experience.