That's a great Torvalds emails which I haven't seen before! Here's the "point" though: > I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to

That's a great Torvalds emails which I haven't seen before! Here's the "point" though: > I happen to believe that not having a kernel debugger forces people to think about their problem on a different level than with a debugger. I think that without a debugger, you don't get into that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. Without a debugger, you tend to think about problems another way. You want to understand things on a different _level_. I think that's really pretty reasonable. Surely you've seen a programmer who ran into a bug and submitted a pull request saying "I fixed it" but it's clearly just a messy work-around which misunderstands the problem and leaves a bunch of analogous problem cases unfixed. I prefer printf-and-inspection debugging myself, I only reach for gdb once a week or so. I'm pretty diligent and my results are quite solid. It's fine that we have different styles, and because of well-designed interfaces, like process boundaries, we can co-exist in peace. Linus is really counter-cultural in today's hip software world, where everyone says everything should be easier and easier. We just can't ever make threads or async or crypto easy enough. Meanwhile the popular applications and frameworks in use seem to get bigger and slower and buggier. Correlation, not causation, but still an annoying trend.