I really don't agree that it is an either-or proposition. As another person replied below, there are things that a debugger enable that you simply are not afforded via print statements/logs.
From an efficiency standpoint, it would be hard to argue that print based debugging is faster. You can do everything you want via print debugging using a good debugger like in Pycharm or even ipdb, and without having to edit any lines of code (at least with the former). Meanwhile, the converse is not true... you are limited to a lot less with print-based debugging.
Furthermore, having tools like a variable viewer, or your editor window automatically showing variable values while debugging (as is the case with Pycharm) makes it a lot easier to reason about code as you debug and I am always much faster at working through issues when I go that route than if I go with print statements or even pdb without all the extra convenience I get from something like the Pycharm debugger.
And finally, it drives me up the wall to see sloppy code from some colleagues with tons of commented out lines like:
`# import pdb; pdb.set_trace()`
littered all over the place. It's both sloppy, and also really annoying when there are random changes in your git-history that are only because these lines keep popping in and out as they try to debug things.
From an efficiency standpoint, it would be hard to argue that print based debugging is faster. You can do everything you want via print debugging using a good debugger like in Pycharm or even ipdb, and without having to edit any lines of code (at least with the former). Meanwhile, the converse is not true... you are limited to a lot less with print-based debugging.
Furthermore, having tools like a variable viewer, or your editor window automatically showing variable values while debugging (as is the case with Pycharm) makes it a lot easier to reason about code as you debug and I am always much faster at working through issues when I go that route than if I go with print statements or even pdb without all the extra convenience I get from something like the Pycharm debugger.
And finally, it drives me up the wall to see sloppy code from some colleagues with tons of commented out lines like:
`# import pdb; pdb.set_trace()`
littered all over the place. It's both sloppy, and also really annoying when there are random changes in your git-history that are only because these lines keep popping in and out as they try to debug things.