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On 06/05/2012 05:40 PM, Henning Diedrich wrote:
<blockquote cite="mid:4FCEA717.4050508@eonblast.com" type="cite">
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<br>
One Open Source loving word regarding the 'hell' quote: <br>
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cite="mid:CANHeBiiYkktUZ3DW1Th6oUJpM6rJPkz3w8234ka9UBSzOF0JcQ@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<pre>I'm hardly the only one who should be embarrassed:
"Erlang tracing is a seething pile of pain that involves reasonably
complex knowledge of clever ports, tracing return formats, and
specialized tracing MatchSpecs (which are really their own special
kind of hell). The tracing mechanism is very powerful indeed, but it
can be hard to grasp."
Obviously, that kind of statement has no place in the official
documentation of a professional product.
</pre>
</blockquote>
<br>
Honest statements like the one you are citing may be the actual
luxury and strong value of Open Source efforts, which are not
directly a commercial product. Possible only because they /are/
not a product. For one user, fresh air like this only creates
trust and allows to (even very precisely) set expectations and
alertness to shortfalls in both documentation and package.<br>
<br>
That is not to paint the situation rosy, it would be lovely if it
was better. But I appreciate the honesty, very much.<br>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
I agree that honesty in the documentation is much more beneficial,
due to it being Open Source, rather than the duplicity that might
otherwise be present in corporate documentation ("Politics-Oriented
Software Development": Documentation,
<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/1/28/32622/4244">http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2005/1/28/32622/4244</a>).<br>
<br>
The issues mentioned previously in the email thread seem to indicate
that Trace-Driven Development would require more documentation and
details, especially documentation that is immediately relevant to
the beginner. Putting redbug into OTP seems like it would help
reduce the learning curve, just since it is the popular approach to
Erlang tracing and has existed for some time. The goal with such
changes would be to make tracing simpler in a way that discourages
the natural programmer reaction to information discovery during
interactive debugging (of systems that are not yet live), which is
inserting print/logging statements. The tendency to use print
statements is a habit from other languages and is often the common
denominator when debugging, so making tracing as simple as a print
statement (documentation-wise and usability-wise) seems like a
sensible goal.<br>
<br>
- Michael<br>
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