Re:In defense of print statements (Score 1)

If you are writing your program entirely by yourself (one-man-band), you of course have more choice over print statements scattered liberally around. On the other hand, if you're working in a team, or are maintaining someone else's code, who may have left the company for instance, this choice becomes somewhat more limited. Different people may have different ideas about where to place print statements and what they should contain. In this case, being able to run and control the code, and what feedback to offer, without (adversely?) affecting anyone else can be very handy. You may have production code to debug, and are unable to, (read should not), change or move/copy it elsewhere, because of dependencies or circumstance. In this case, the ability to run your code and to modify it WITHOUT CHANGING THE SOURCE can be very useful. The debugger is one tool among many, use whichever suits your purpose and ability as appropriate. R.