IDE

[Georg Wrede]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> John Reimer wrote:
>> 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.

Ever since before he went to the net about writing the OS, he was 
surrounded by a lot of friendly guys, not all of whom [how should I put 
this] were too comfortable with deep abstractions or hard-core 
concurrency issues.

Problem was, from day one, that these guys wanted so bad to help, but 
the code they wrote wasn't worth the effort of trying to understand the 
spaghetti inside. At the same time, some of them were disappointed when 
after the great effort they had seen, none of their code made it in. And 
some other guys just pass by, hear about this for the first time, and 
off-hand send Linus 30 lines of C, making Linus yell out of excitement. 
It's so wrong, ain't it?

Already at that time there were rumors that Linus accepts code more from 
'cool guys' than from his own friends.

So by this time, he's thoroughly fed-up with that kind of crap. What 
could he possibly say to make folks believe it's the code itself, and 
its merits and nothing else?

> 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 not one of those ego-guys. (Ego-guys in my book being Larry Ellison 
of Oracle, Richard Stallman of FSF, etc. Exemplary non-ego-guys being 
(surprise!) Bill Gates of Microsoft, Steve Bourne of unix sh fame, etc.)

So "to make him feel like he's doing something special" doesn't apply to 
Linus. Then again "constructed a situation that allows him to avoid 
confrontation" definitely applies to Linus.

By this time, he's not even trying to fend off accusations of egotism, 
nepotism, you name it. It's a lot easier to proclaim wide and loud that 
he's an asshole, an impossible being, and a capricious dictator.

That way he gets at least some room to breathe.

Besides, when did one ever see a real asshole doing anything else than 
cover up _being_ an asshole? Let alone "admitting" it publicly.

> 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.

(Wish I had something to say about that, but I don't.)

>> 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.

Aww, I was trying to make it not come out like that. I haven't anything 
against debuggers, it's just that I personally can't find them useful 
enough given my particular "brain anatomy". And I do see why it's 
important that kernel patches get submitted by Real Programmers only -- 
or we'll have to wait for bug fixes to take even longer.

(Suppose D gets as well known as Linux. Then it might happen that 
Walter's postman has to get a big truck for the fan mail and the 
Friendly and Helpful Patches. And he'll get some 2000 patches every day 
by email, not counting fan mail, folks asking for favors, and the usual 
crap.)

> 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

Heh, so D is making us all into Real Men! I kind of like that! :-)