Comment by f1shy

I know plenty of professional programmers (job title states so) that not even they do not use a debugger, many don’t even know how to install/use one or even the very concept of “execute step by step”. Plenty of python users don’t know what pdb is (as matter of fact, have never met one that does know it!). Also plenty of embedded developers writing C or C++ or Java

They go all the time adding hundreds of print(f) of log_* function calls. Often they don’t care to remove them after the fact, as I ask them to, often comes “can/will be useful to detect future bugs”

I’m in the automotive industry, where is known to be a disaster in topic SW. but I think it is also common in other industries. I have seen it in telco already.

While I agree that knowing a debugger is important, and as a leader won’t hire somebody who do not use it, is a fact that many people don’t use it, and are doing ok.

Last but not least, it must be said sometimes you have to go to prints: in fact yesterday I had to, as I was debugging a library with sockets, which would timeout pretty quickly. I used dprintf in gdb, but the advantage to simple prints was not huge.