Mail Archives: djgpp/2001/06/28/22:45:04.1
On 28 Jun 2001 18:04:55 -0700, Sinan_Unur AT mail DOT com (A. Sinan Unur) sat
on a tribble, which squeaked:
>The really viable idea is to sit down and actually debug your program.
>Try to come up with a minimal version that still exhibits the problem,
>then you will find the cause.
Yeah, like I didn't try that. It's a very unstable Heisenbug. Add one
debugging printf and the bug disappears or goes into stealth mode.
(Wonders if it can fire while cloaked ... nah)
>Which features get implemented, if they are feasible at all, depend on
>both the cost and benefit from implementing them. The possibility that
>the benefit from a feature may be positive does not necessarily imply
>the feature should be implmented. The benefit must be greater than the
>cost of implementing it. (The cost being the time and energy of the
>people whom you are asking to implement).
The funny thing with open source is that the feature should always be
added, because over the expected (very long) lifetime of the program,
the benefit will accumulate to something astronomical no matter how
obscure and minor the feature. Maybe this is why open source is at
least as prone to creeping featurism as proprietary crap.
--
Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980
"There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980
"This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998
Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.
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