Linus Says No to 'Specs'

auckland map writes to tell us about an interesting debate that is being featured on KernelTrap. Linus Torvalds raised a few eyebrows (and furrowed even more in confusion) by saying "A 'spec' is close to useless. I have _never_ seen a spec that was both big enough to be useful _and_ accurate. And I have seen _lots_ of total crap work that was based on specs. It's _the_ single worst way to write software, because it by definition means that the software was written to match theory, not reality."

Comments

Re:Linus Taken to Task

[Rakshasa Taisab]

The summary is twisting the discussion into something very flamebait worthy, and it gives a false impression of what Linus really said.

From my impression of the discussion it isn't specs he is against, but rather following those specs without being flexible enough to take reality into account. Would you really want to fly the plane built to spec, if some of those specs turned out to not accurately reflect reality? In that case you'd change the specs, but that's not always possible.

In this specific case, the problem was someone using the abstraction layering described in the spec, while the kernel would according to the others be better off using another design. If the software behaves equivalently, it should not matter how it is designed internally.