IDE

Sean Kelly sean at f4.ca
Sat Feb 25 09:33:26 PST 2006


John Reimer wrote:
> In article <dtp0m9$5gl$1 at digitaldaemon.com>, Sean Kelly says...
>> Georg Wrede wrote:
>>> Now, D is IMHO an excellent First Language. And some people really seem 
>>> to find debuggers useful. Personally I never use them, because I find 
>>> myself distracted and concentrating on the debugger instead of thinking 
>>> of the problem.
>>>
>>> With D, let folks have debuggers if they want. But to become a real 
>>> programmer, one should learn to bike without the baby wheels.
>> Debuggers become quite useful in team environments where you didn't 
>> necessarily write a lot of the code in the program.  Particularly if 
>> it's an old program where DBC and similar approaches simply aren't 
>> feasible because the app was designed with the expectation that invalid 
>> parameters should be swallowed.  Sure I could still work out in my head 
>> how the thing is working, but if the system is alreadying held together 
>> by spit and bubblegum it may take quite a while to accomplish.  I think 
>> Linus' comments are valid for some portion of the software community, 
>> but not necessarily all of it.
> 
> 
> I agree, Sean.  But looking over the article again, I have to observe that Linus
> was quite specific about his opinion as it applied to /kernel/ debuggers.  He
> doesn't seem to have given an opinion on the use of debuggers in general.  Thus,
> I may have overeacted about his opinion, though I still disliked his manner (I
> haven't the experience to counter his opinion about kernel debuggers).

I realized that later as well.  But I still disagree with Linus.  It 
seems like he's creating an artificially high barrier for entry in hopes 
that it will filter out some of the people he'd rather not work with, 
and to allow him to blame the inherent difficulty of kernel programming 
when someone requests a feature he doesn't want to implement.  But Linus 
has both the right to choose or reject whomever he wants as a 
co-developer, and the right to say "no" to anyone he chooses.  Upon 
reflection, it seems like Linus has simply constructed a situation that 
allows him to avoid confrontation and to make him feel like he's doing 
something really special.  He's welcome to do that, but I hope people 
realize what's actually going on when his bug fixes take five times 
longer than they need to.

> The generalization occured as a result of Georg Wrede's post in which he took
> Linus opinion and expanded it into a distaste for debuggers in general.

Aye.  "Real men don't use debuggers."  Personally, I can't relate to 
Georg's comment about how not using a debugger forces you to think about 
the problem in a different way.  But then I don't use the bulk of the 
fancier features provided by debuggers these days either, so perhaps 
that's part of the reason.  And with the state of things in D, I haven't 
used a debugger here at all :-p


Sean



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