> pride in

Not really: the linked text shows it is a costly strategy to avoid later «self flagellation»: it is meant to avoid the practice of mindless coding - of overly fast feature insertion, blowing amounts of low quality code to maintain. Torvalds: «I'd rather not work with people who aren't careful».

Also: «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 ... that mindset where you know how it behaves, and then you fix it from there. [...] It's that you have to look at the level _above_ sources. At the meaning of things. Without a debugger, you basically have to go the next step: understand what the program does. Not just that particular line».

Implicit in that argument is that these kernel developers are writing low quality code / coding mindlessly. That’s a bold statement to make when you don’t know who I’m talking about.

At no point has anyone suggested using the debugger in lieu of understanding what the program does and that’s a pure strawman. Understanding is step 0. Once you’ve done that piece, a debugger levels up your game. Same with other tools like profilers, printf debugging, EBPF debugging, etc. Hell, even simple things like executing the code in the first place / running tests / gathering metrics is a debugging tool. It’s rare that someone stares at a difficult bug until they see the matrix. It usually involves iteration cycles of some kind to test out different hypothesis / collect data and a debugger is one tool to speed up those iteration cycles.

There was a story on HN a while back about how one of the inventors of Ethernet had to hook up oscilloscopes to figure out what the electrical signal was doing to figure out why CSMA wasn’t working properly. An oscilloscope is an analog debugger and you can’t tell me that the inventor of Ethernet didn’t understand Ethernet or that the oscilloscope hampered that in any way, especially since the bug turned out to be very nuanced with a chip generating a spike switching modes.

As the cheerful used to say: "«You» who"?

That is not implicit: it seems explicit and literal. Apparently, Torvalds must have had different experiences - and evidently within a strongly different framework: it looks like the project manager in a drastic effort to propagate the will about what is part of the project and what is not.

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

— Brian Kernighan

That doesn't really refute the point that Carmack made. Namely that a lot of the supposed inherent difficulty in the endeavour of debugging is actually incidental from a general cultural attachment to crap old tooling.

And I believe the point of Kernighan, as well as Torvalds, is that the difficulty of debugging serves as a bulwark against over-complicated code.

So that's why ed(1) is the standard text editor. Anything more usable is a dangerous extravagance! :)

Sounds like Brian has never used a good debugger

UNIX has never been the place of cool graphical debugging anyway.