Don't both perspectives make sense? If you are working on a relatively small or modular codebase for a long period of time Torvalds perspective makes sense, si

Don't both perspectives make sense? If you are working on a relatively small or modular codebase for a long period of time Torvalds perspective makes sense, since the codebase will also benefit from that kind of introspection (ok Linux is not exactly small but excluding drivers is on the order of ~100k AFAIK, which is small relative to the time it's been active); id games are on the order of millions of lines of code (according to Carmack) and while the different engine generations are related they still draw a line under each one after a certain point and move on so they are also very time limited. I enjoy playing computer in my head in fine detail on small code and find a lot of joy in small code. But I can also respect that on a large and unwieldy enough code base where it's necessary, it's going to make more sense to lean on a debugger and other tools more often.