It's time to take your meds.

It sounds like what you're referring to may be a reference an oft-quoted piece from Brian Kernighan (originally via "The Elements of Programming Style"):

“Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?”

They do use it for Intellisense though, because C++ code is so difficult to process that Microsoft couldn't manage to re-use their own (presumably it'd be too much work to re-architect).

Which means that there are essentially only two truly robust, re-usable C++ front-ends in the world: Clang and EDG. This is bad for everyone, because it hurts portability.

(So I totally emphasize with the OP's comments. I wish there were some way to version the language, so that we wouldn't have to be saddled with backwards compatibiliy cruft for eternity.)

The pursuit of a worthy opponent on the battlefield is, to a true warrior, the reason to rise each morning.

Brain segmentation fault: received SIGSEG_PERSON_TYPED_POST_TOO_FAST (aborting).

From Mike's blog (in reference to the ZFS+Fishworks effort), probably the highest profile departure from the aforementioned article is this fun fact:

"What began as a mere $2.1M incremental engineering investment for 2.8 years has now shipped more than 100 petabytes, more than 6000 systems, and 100X in revenue. "

That would be fine - and be like the RHEL/Fedora duo, but you don't get any updates with OpenSolaris either. When "the network is the computer", everyone should at least get security updates.

I have to wonder what is entailed when you say "formal status reports." Perhaps yours are too onerous. I write a couple sentences every week, which doesn't take too much time at a minimum. If I want to write more I can--and do. I can provide links to an article I wrote in our internal wiki if the information is much more extensive.

At first it seemed like just another waste of time, however, I can see how it can be useful: it can help prevent _in person_ meetings, when your whole team gets to see the status reports from your group.

Excellent suggestion. By isolating communication to go through you, you can misreport anything that comes from your team--including taking credit (or exaggerating your role) for any of their good ideas--and if anything bad should happen you need only blame one of them. Meanwhile you can maintain the impression that all is well to your team, and play both sides against each other if it suits your purposes.
DevilsAdvocate++;