This is going to be a short one… print() statements and logger.debug() statements achieve the same thing for the most part. They both print some output in your programs to stdout. Using a logger does offer some advantages over using bare print() statements. With a logger you can easily suppress some output based on a logging level and/or redirect the output to a file instead of stdout, for example. This is all great but I want to try and sell something else that’s often not emphasised on using a logger.
print() and logger.debug() may achieve the same end but using each of those functions expresses some intent. A print() statement in my opinion tells the reader of a program that this is output that the program is built to produce. In other words, the output being produced at that particular line, meets a functional requirement. A logging statement coming from a logger on the other hand expresses that this is output that is latent to the primary operations of this program. It is there not to meet a functional requirement, rather it is meant to spill out the guts of the program for diagnostic purposes. When I see a print() statement in code, I zone onto it to see what it is printing out because I assume that the output being produced by that statement is there to meet a functional requirement. On the other hand, when I see a line starting with logger, my brain happily ignores those lines as they are of no consequence.
I may have focused on logging here but this idea does apply to a number of other things in programming in general. An example, A while and for statement both do achieve the same thing but for certain kinds of use cases, one may be better at expressing a programmer’s intent than the other. Keep that in mind… It is also a good idea to pick up on various idioms in one’s programming languages. Idioms are very good at expressing intent to other seasoned programmers. An idiom makes it easy for one to tell what a programmer’s intentions are without having to read every single line and grok the sum total of those lines.
PISS OUT!!!