I find myself adding debugging "print" statements quite often -- stuff like this:

print("a_variable_name: %s" % a_variable_name)

How do you all do that? Am I being neurotic in trying to find a way to optimize this? I may be working on a function and put in a half-dozen or so of those lines, figure out why it's not working, and then cut them out again.

Have you developed an efficient way of doing that?

I'm coding Python in Emacs.