@anonymous234 said in Random thought of the day:
@chozang said in Random thought of the day:
linear debuggability
I have no idea what that means, and neither does Google.
I am glad Google has no idea, because I invented the idea. (But have no plans on taking the time to implement it, so maybe I'm not glad.)
Are you truly unable to look at the two words, and construct a reasonable meaning from the combination of the two? (That sounds harsher than I intended.)
Consider how often the average programmer has to resort to Google. The reason we have to do web searches for answers to problems is because there's no good debugging process. You should not have to do that, you should be able to debug the problems yourself. Picture yourself in a typical day, trying to figure out what someone else's program is doing. Imagine how much easier it would be, for example, if you could right-click on a button, select, open in debugger, and it would take you to a debugger. You could then set breakpoints, and run the program between breakpoints.
When you try to do that now, there are often too many disconnects that make this difficult. You have to stop and think about different approaches you can take to find the cause of the problem. That is, it's not a linear process. There's not just one approach you can follow to completion.
Imagine if there were an OS designed from the bottom up to make debugging easier. It could be similar to Linux, as far as possible. As it was booting up, the screen output would stop scrolling for a couple of seconds and would have instructions for finding the log of what was going on during the boot process. The information on the log would be relatively easy to read - you would not have to be an expert to interpret it.
Programs that were built for it would be expected to follow certain principles, such as implementing the right-click method given above.
In sum, you would not have to be an expert, or consult the web, to find the cause of a problem. It may sound pie-in-the-sky, but I think it could be done. It would just need a visionary willing to put the time into it, akin to a Torvalds or a Terry A. Davis.
I remember when a scrolling menu was described as "pie in the sky".