== What I use printf for when hacking changes into programs I [[tweeted https://twitter.com/thatcks/status/907452701029650433]]: > Once again I've managed to hack a change into a program through brute > force, guesswork, determined grepping, & printf. They'll get you far. First off, when I say that I hacked a change in, I don't mean that I carefully analyzed the program and figured out the correct and elegant place to change the program's behavior to what I wanted. I mean that I found a spot where I could add a couple of lines of code that reset some variables and when the dust settled, it worked. I didn't carefully research my new values for those variables; instead I mostly experimented until things worked. That's why I described this as being done with brute force and guesswork. The one thing in my list that may stand out is printf (hopefully the uses of grep are pretty obvious; you've got to find things in the source code somehow, since you're certainly not reading it systematically). When I'm hacking a program up like this, the concise way to describe what I'm using printf for is ~~I use printf to peer into the dynamic behavior of the program~~. In theory how the program behaves at runtime is something that you can deduce from understanding the source code, the APIs that it uses, and so on. This sort of understanding is vital if you're actively working on the program and you want relatively clean changes, but it takes time (and you have to actually know the programming languages involved, and so on). When I'm hacking changes into a program, [[I may not even know the language NotKnowingLanguageLimitations]] and I certainly don't have the time and energy to carefully read the code, learn the APIs, and so on. Since I'm not going to deduce this from the source code, I take the brute force approach of modifying the program so that it just tells me things like whether some things are called and what values variables have. In other words, I shove printf calls into various places and see what they report. I could do the same thing with a debugger, but generally [[I find printf-based debugging easier WhyPrintBasedDebugging]] and often I'd have to figure out how to hook up a debugger to the program and then make everything work right. For that matter, I may not have handy a debugger that works well with [[whatever language https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/Vala]] the program happens to use. Installing and learning a new debugger just to avoid adding some printfs (or the equivalent) is rather a lot of [[yak shaving https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/yak_shaving]].