Omniscient Debugging

Omniscient Debugging
lambdacs.com

There is also a more modern-looking, commercial implementation of the same concept, but I've never used it: http://www.chrononsystems.com/

"Everybody loves it! They clearly understand the concept. They ask great questions, they make suggestions. But do they use it afterwards??

The ODB is as close to a silver bullet as you can get. Why don't people use it?

I don't get it. :-("

"Needed

More than anything else, I need people to use the ODB."

Now, this tool is not for me personally - I don't see myself writing for JVM anytime soon - but it seems really good. I wanted to ask you, as the author is asking, why don't you, Java and other JVM programmers, use this tool?

Is it that there are better tools? You're not allowed to use this? You don't think it is worth it? The tool itself proved to be somehow lacking? Or are you actually using it heavily and the page is outdated?

I know nothing about Java ecosystem, Java programming or about ODB - I just felt that, if what the author writes is true, it's truly sad situation and would like to know why it happened.

Think of any successful project like a nuclear chain reaction. If you are not familiar with nuclei, some of them are "too heavy" and want to fall apart, spraying neutrons everywhere; they especially do this when they get absorb an extra neutron flying around, but quantum mechanics always gives you a spare neutron eventually.

The system transitions from negative feedback (no chain reaction) to positive feedback (chain reaction) according to a very simple principle: the number of free neutrons that a free neutron creates (call it N) must be more than one. (N=1 is the replacement rate; it's a metastable state of reaction. If you like, the reason why some nuclear reactors have been risky is that horrible accidents kill the safeguards which are simply designed to force N ≤ 1.)

This principle is so fundamental -- it's why there's a 'meme' analogue to the 'genes' in the modern theory of evolution, why countries become bureaucracies, and why nuclear reactors are hard -- that I hope everyone working in startups starts thinking about their products this way. It's not signups which you need to have a successful product. It's that every free customer must convert, on average, greater than or equal to one new free customer. Even if you cannot get all the way to one, you boost your marketing effects by a factor of 1/(1 - N), so if you can increase N from converting 0.25 people per person to 0.30 people per person, it's as good as spending 10% more on marketing.

And it applies, yes, to any open-source project too. The open-source projects which succeed are those which help hackers to help those projects, just like the genes which succeed are the ones which help their species to spread that gene. I'm not even sure that this particular project is open-source. (I believe it falls into a special case where the GPL is used as a closed-source license. That is, GPL requires me to provide a copy of the source code when I distribute the code -- but I do not have the source code, and I cannot coerce the author into giving it to me, so I am not actually free to distribute the binary either until they give me permission to do so one way or another.) The author's claimed reason for not providing a way to "Fork me on GitHub" is, "I have not made a major effort to put its code on any of the open source repositories as it does not currently seem the right thing to do. Just not worth the effort." And that's probably the deepest reason why it's fallen into neglect.