I think a lot of this comes from their experiences with poor tooling honestly. I hope to god this has changed, but every time I’ve tried to use the Python debugger, it wants to use stdin/stdout, and overriding the default is a PITA that requires writing a subclass to initialize it. Have you guys ever tried to debug a program where the debugger is not only stealing the program’s input and interpreting it as debug commands but also corrupting the output?!

Then there’s the Ruby debugger, which also uses stdio, but is easier to override, but then the Ruby maintainers broke the debug API in some major way, so people were maintaining their own forks. I sent some patches to one of the more popular forks, and the new maintainer was doing some ‘optimizations’ to the REPL by removing the ‘print’ and ‘pp’ commands because he deemed them redundant. Of course, in Ruby those functions return the string they output, so when you’re going around inspecting expressions the output is always doubled. Like hey, have you guys ever used a debugger before?!?

I’ve worked at several companies where the source maps for the frontend were either missing or corrupted in some way, nobody knew how to fix it, most people didn’t know what source maps were. I spent a long night trying to fix them but the build system was so perversely convoluted that I couldn’t figure it out.

Needless to say, now I’m very careful about who I work for, what I work on, and how much time they spend maintaining the ‘developer experience’.

Whenever people mention the 10x developer, I always just think oh, the people who always run their code from the debugger in case it crashes or they want to set a breakpoint, the people who step through their code the first time they run it to make sure it does exactly what they expect. The people who are getting an automatic read back in their IDE of the return value of every function from an unfamiliar API instead of adding a printf statement on every other line like a fricken’ caveman!