IDE

Sean Kelly sean at f4.ca
Sat Feb 25 16:25:09 PST 2006


Georg Wrede wrote:
> Sean Kelly wrote:
> 
> 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?

It's definitely a tough situation to be in.  I've thought about this 
situation even with respect to Ares (mostly speculatively, given that 
it's a tiny project) and I don't know that there's any way to make 
everyone happy.  So I can definitely sympathize with Linus if this was a 
motivating factor.

>> 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.

I didn't really mean it in that way so much as that I had a vague 
impression that Linus is somewhat insecure in the way that a lot of 
geeks are.  But I know hardly anything about the man so it was a shot in 
the dark :-)

>> 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.)

And I might be completely off the mark.  When you're as familiar with 
the code as Linus probably is with the Linux kernel, debuggers are often 
simply unnecessary.  But they're a great tool to have available just in 
case.

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

"The D Programming Language - Puts Hair on Your Chest" might be a bit of 
a put-off for the women here ;-)


Sean



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