[sdevonoes]

I use debuggers, but only if "prints" don't help me figure out the issue at hand first. Debugging via "prints" works out of the box.

You put a "print" statement dumping whatever data structure you want, you run the program again, and voila you got something. Now, the "where to put the print" is an art on itself of course. If you don't know where to put it, then either you start writing multiple "print"s here and there (following an approach similar to binary search) or you use a debugger and go step by step until you find right place to inspect.

The problem with debuggers is that they do not work out of the box. If you use the terminal, then you have use an external program and read its manual to understand how to debug, how to put breaks. Depending on the platform you are using, you may require even an executable to run the debugger on. Sometimes you don't have an executable. Sometimes you don't know where the "entry" point of your program is, but you know where the bug relies. Some debuggers require you to point the debugger to the entry point.

If you use an IDE like Jetbrains', then for debugging you need as well to do some (minimal) setup as well (the last week I had to debug a Node.js program: it was simple, but it didn't work out of the box. Also, when I open my IDE on a different Node.js repository, my debugging setup was gone).