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."

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Linus is not always right

[tototitui]

From the same thread again from Linus, he doesn't spare us of a weird view about what science is !

It's like real science: if you have a theory that doesn't match experiments, it doesn't matter _how_ much you like that theory. It's wrong. You can use it as an approximation, but you MUST keep in mind that it's an approximation.

A theory is the best explanation we have for a set of facts, a hole in it doesn't make it suddenly "wrong" if we don't have anything more accurate. (cf weird cosmologic constants and things like that). A theory beeing an approximation, it is always true.