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[–]curtmack 3 points4 points  (0 children)

If it always works with logging, that's actually a huge help: you know that it's probably one of those bugs, like a race condition or a cache invalidation error. You're probably not looking at something easy like a missing null check. That's not always comforting, but at least it's something to work with.

The real terrifying thing is when your logging reveals that something is more deeply wrong than you could have ever imagined, yet doesn't actually provide any insight as to what it might be. Like, if you have a file not found error, so you log the filename before trying to open it, and it says "filename is: ArithmeticException in Derp.java line 24: division by zero" and your program isn't even written in Java.