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> The reason that Reflexion Models are obscure while Mylyn is among the most popular Eclipse plugins is quite literally because Gail C. Murphy, creator of Refle

> The reason that Reflexion Models are obscure while Mylyn is among the most popular Eclipse plugins is quite literally because Gail C. Murphy, creator of Reflexion Models, decided to go into academia, while her student Mik Kersten, creator of Mylyn, went into industry. > Other fields of computer science don’t seem to have such a giant rift between the accomplishments of researchers and practitioners. I'm not sure that's actually true. I can't think of a field I've studied where research generated software from a decade ago still worked out of the box. If you write software for Java 7 that proves your concept is feasible, the existence of Java 14 doesn't disprove it, so nobody funds the research to port it. This is as true for bioinformatics as compilers. There's also a pretty strong hurdle in simply educating the software development community. I suspected if you did a sufficiently large poll of developers, less than 5 percent have set a breakpoint and used a debugger in the past year. It seems even renowned experts believe debuggers are not valuable[1]. And I suspect at least half of people who claim proficiency in git can't correctly explain the difference between the rebase and merge commands. And that, IMO, is the mystery we need to explain. If the hypothesis is that weak but free tools are undercutting the market for advanced tools, why don't developers learn and use the tools freely available to them? Are the tools too hard to learn, not powerful enough, or something else? I suspect there's a time tradeoff going on -- learning how to use a tool takes time, so if you believe you have a slow method that will solve the problem, you might prefer it to investing in learning something new. Especially outside the research lab, where there is uncertainty that any given tool will actually solve the problem at hand, and a researcher hasn't handcrafted a tutorial to make your assigned task feasible. [1]: https://lemire.me/blog/2016/06/21/i-do-not-use-a-debugger/ https://lemire.me/blog/2016/06/21/i-do-not-use-a-debugger/

dr_kiszonka 6y ago
I use breakpoints when software supports it out of the box. Unfortunately, many third-party tools, IDE and Jupyter extensions in particular, are often of poor quality/WIP, are hard to use and can, at times, break my environment. For this reason, when a tool requires that I install additional packages, I am usually pretty reluctant to give it a try. Curiously, even seemingly simple tools, like variable explorers, are usually implemented relatively poorly in most IDEs. I like JetBrains's implementation most, but it isn't without issues. BTW, anybody has any recommendations for good and reliable, developer tool for Python and R?
chillfox 6y ago
The problem really is a lack of solutions that just work with no setup required. The only two environments I have used where things just worked were VB.NET using Visual Studio while at uni and Dart using the IDE/editor they bundled in the early days (I think they discontinued it). Every other time I have attempted to get a debugger working for a language I have spend hours without getting anywhere.
Agingcoder 6y ago
Debuggers are very specific tools, and I've never really liked them. Basically, you get a tiny view of what your code is doing, and have to slowly build a mental model of what's going on through time. I have found that prints and code reading (in a good IDE which is able to track variable references!) are often enough, and usually faster,for the kind of software I write. Now, things are getting better: mozilla's RR is a game changer(reverse debugging on actual, large projects ), and more recently, pernosco (built on RR but very close to science-fiction) has at long last made me like debuggers again. https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/ https://www.pernos.co/ https://www.pernos.co/

dr_kiszonka 6y ago

I use breakpoints when software supports it out of the box. Unfortunately, many third-party tools, IDE and Jupyter extensions in particular, are often of poor quality/WIP, are hard to use and can, at times, break my environment. For this reason, when a tool requires that I install additional packages, I am usually pretty reluctant to give it a try. Curiously, even seemingly simple tools, like variable explorers, are usually implemented relatively poorly in most IDEs. I like JetBrains's implementation most, but it isn't without issues. BTW, anybody has any recommendations for good and reliable, developer tool for Python and R?

chillfox 6y ago

The problem really is a lack of solutions that just work with no setup required. The only two environments I have used where things just worked were VB.NET using Visual Studio while at uni and Dart using the IDE/editor they bundled in the early days (I think they discontinued it). Every other time I have attempted to get a debugger working for a language I have spend hours without getting anywhere.

Agingcoder 6y ago

Debuggers are very specific tools, and I've never really liked them. Basically, you get a tiny view of what your code is doing, and have to slowly build a mental model of what's going on through time. I have found that prints and code reading (in a good IDE which is able to track variable references!) are often enough, and usually faster,for the kind of software I write. Now, things are getting better: mozilla's RR is a game changer(reverse debugging on actual, large projects ), and more recently, pernosco (built on RR but very close to science-fiction) has at long last made me like debuggers again. https://rr-project.org/ https://rr-project.org/ https://www.pernos.co/ https://www.pernos.co/