No, the console API is a handy thing to learn. Alert is not handy, it's an ancient function that (a) blocks your page thread, (b) can't show anything except `.valueOf`, (c) can't be selectively ignored, (d) it's an obsolete API from way back when javascript 1.5 was hot stuff.

If you're teaching, teach people to use console.log because that's where they're going to get REAL insight into what the code's doing (console.table you say? amazing!) and never look back. And if you're learning, demand people teach you modern practices. Not ridiculous things from 20 years ago.

> proper context.

That's not 'tests' — tests would be something like Mocha, or Jasmine — what you're actually talking about here is one of the many forms of ad hoc in-browser debugging.

Automatic tests are not the only way to test software, nor are they sufficient. Whether some software can actually be used is not something that's completely formalizable and so you can't test it automatically. You always need a human in the loop in the end, and alert is a legitimate tool to effortlessly display some additional information on internal state during an interactive user test.

> ad hoc in-browser debugging

Ah, if only there was a single word - a verb perhaps - that developers could use to colloquially refer to this process!

Not testing the code, fidling with the stuff they are learning.