Divisions of labor (was: Development engineering)

[Cameron Laird]

In article <1gkiywn.1ydvxr62u3q0dN%aleaxit at yahoo.com>,
Alex Martelli <aleaxit at yahoo.com> wrote:
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		[much that deserves comment]
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>This is a reflection I had as a consequence of this episode.  But if I
>meet about two "super-horrible bugs" a year, and a perfect debugger
>would save me 3 days or so in each case, I need to find one that I can
>learn to use with perfect skill in less than 6 days, and keep
>well-trained on at no cost.  Half the incantations that WingIDE guru was
>incanting were completely lost on me and the other guy helping us out in
>that debugging -- if I took a week to learn it, and then didn't have any
>need for it for months, I'd have to relearn it again 7 months later...
>not a net win.
>
>I was highly skilled back when I had to use MS Visual Studio to develop
>and debug C++ code -- but it's the kind of skill my brain expunges as
>fast as it possibly can, as soon as it becomes unused (as opposed to,
>say, weird interesting facts about languages and libraries I may not
>have used for years -- THOSE, for me, tend to stay around somewhere in
>my brain!-)
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I made almost exactly the same calculation, and certainly
came to the same conclusion.

This still leaves open the question of precisely what the
alternative is--to have eager debugger-savvy friends?  I
think there's more to it.  I'll likely return to this.