Haha, the question makes sense per se but there are definitely times where you want to see the output in real time. I'm a big fan of printf-debugging :D

It feels good to hear support for printf-debugging coming from such esteemed corner. I have been doing that for a significant majority of my career instead of dropping into debugger. The side effect is you become pretty good at crafting meaningful logs.

Sure, I redirect when there is to redirect, but sometimes during debugging you want to spam yourself to see what is happening during some stress testing when some code path is full of printfs. Also sometimes I'm just on the redis-cli and to test the system at scale I directly ask (like yesterday) for half million of similar vectors. It is very convenient I can type this on the CLI and see the result immediately, instead of flooding myself for seconds or minutes.

so, it's convenience. fair enough. i'm just trying to make sense of why it is so popular on hn. i often see stuff rated to mount everest here and i just don't get it. and then i'm wondering is it me? or is it them? am i one of those weak engineers who just don't know what's going on? that's all.

Since you asked, your point above effectively says "why don't you just work around your terminal emulator being slow by making more work for yourself?" That's not a compelling argument.

not really - the use case mentioned where you suffer from a slow terminal is a code smell as far as i am concerned

No it isn’t.

“why would you want your work to be easier” — yea, it’s you

Please don't be snarky or cross into personal attack. We're trying for the opposite here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html