

Linux: Linus Says, Linux Not Designed; It Never Was - messel
http://kerneltrap.org/node/11

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RyanMcGreal
One of the things I respect about Linus is that he's such a gifted troll. :)

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known
Linus is right here. Kernel is not a Business Requirement. He was scratching
his Technical itch.

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DougBTX
The best kind of troll, the one who is correct. Or is that the worst?

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btilly
It is interesting to read this and compare with _Worse is Better_ :
<http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html>

Note that all of the ways the worse, less designed solution (Unix, C), are
better boil down to being better from an adaptation/colonization/survival
perspective. In other words the rise of Unix/C is computer evolution in
action.

Linus just recognizes that that applies to Linux as well.

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ivenkys
Absolutely , that was the first thing that came to my mind - this is <i>Worse
is Better</i> and taking a further leap its a result of <i>Release Early and
Release Often</i>.

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cpach
You can use asterisks to get italicized text:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc>

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ivenkys
Thanks.

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robin_reala
Probably worth pointing out that this article is from 2002.

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mynameishere
Just a meta-question here: Is pointing out the date of something worth 25
upmods? I mean, when so-and-so got to the forum and saw that...

 _Probably worth pointing out that this article is from 2002._

...was only upmodded 24 times, did he say to himself:

 _Only Twenty-Four upmods? This deeply insightful bit of time-tellery is worth
Twenty-Five if it's worth a farthing! I shall upmod at once!_

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s3b
You're reading too much into it. The points just indicate that around 25
people didn't realize the article was from 2002 until they read the comment so
they upmodded

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messel
Pretty fantastic look into how Linus see's technology design, versus
evolutionary engineering. F'ing awesome.

Linus' outlook on optimal engineering reminds me of Kevin Kelly's swarm and
emergence writings.

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blasdel
Don't tar Linus' acerbic pragmatism with KK's technobabble idealism.

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jacquesm
The Designers of UNIX are called Ritchie and Thompson.

Linux is a re-implementation of that design.

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Confusion
This quote by Linus applies:

 _But that's like saying that you know that you're going to build a car with
four wheels and headlights - it's true, but the real bitch is in the details._

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jacquesm
Go read an old unix source and tell me if you think it's just the four wheels
and the headlights that were common.

Sure there are details, lots of them. Many of those were copied.

And linux didn't even get all of them right, even copying is hard work.

So it's an evolution of the original design.

Especially now, two decades later.

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rudin
Linus: "Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their
engineering practices or their coding style."

This was in 2001. How does one get such prophetic skills.

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dmoney
Everything is doomed if you wait long enough.

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fauigerzigerk
That's exactly right. On top of that Sun had just lost 80% of its market
capitalisation and there was a general sense of doom in the tech industry back
then.

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joss82
The first Linus comment on that page is the best comment post I have ever
read.

It make so much sense ! I can see clearly now !

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hxa7241
Natural evolution is best? One word: wheel . . .

Linux _as a whole_ was not designed -- that is easy to accept, and also that
it is a strength.

However, design is not so entirely opposed to evolution as might be inferred.
Design seems essentially to have some iterative character too. It always
entails a some series of ideas, rejections, and then further adjusted ideas.
That is deliberately controlled, but it still has _variation_ and _selection_
\-- so the possibility of blending between design and evolution is very
reasonable.

And given the wheel example, artificial design has something to offer too.

(I think Torvalds' view is consonant with this. -- I mean, is he not overall
offering some combination of evolution and design?)

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bad_user
Your wheel example is not good.

Before wheels, I'm pretty sure people used tree trunks to drag heavy objects
from A to B. And I'm pretty sure the wheel's inventor hasn't envisioned the
average consumer car we have today either.

Linus's point is that design happens at a micro-level, but at a macroscopic
level the direction of a successful project should be made by trial and error
with a feedback cycle.

To put things in perspective ... Linux is not designed for servers, it is not
designed for desktops, it is not designed for real-time systems, it is not
designed for mobile phones. When people wanted to use Linux for such stuff,
they took it and modified it to their will, and the parts that slowed them
down were eventually removed / refactored.

That's actually very true if you look at the history of many successful
projects. And that's evolution more than design. "Release early and often" is
exactly about this.

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hxa7241
> Your wheel example is not good.

Well, no it isn't too good. But it does basically fit: It is a small feature
of larger systems, as you describe, and it has been done better by artificial
design.

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Hexstream
This surprised me:

"Take TCP for example. The TCP protocol is specified in a series of documents.
If you make a formally correct implementation of the base TCP RFC you won't
even make connections. Much of the flow control behaviour, the queueing and
the detail is learned only by being directly part of the TCP implementing
community. You can read all the scientific papers you like, it will not make
you a good TCP implementor."

\- Alan Cox

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pohl
It's interesting that Linus believes that Linux is the most widely deployed
Unix. I would have guessed that MacOS X might have surpassed it by now.

Edit: Oops...this is from 2001

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yan
Well, firstly that post was written eight years ago. Secondly, OS X might
surpass it on Desktops, but what about servers, computing clusters and so on?

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mbrubeck
Not to mention phones, TiVos, netbooks, routers, Kindles, NAS devices...

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rythie
OS X is on a lot of phones though (the iPhone)

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axod
linux is on most wireless access points, routers, etc :/ That's a lot of
units.

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tigerthink
Evolution isn't that impressive. Humans could build human-level AIs if we had
millions of years too.

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diN0bot
reminds me of yesterday's font page submission on poor use of analogies. not
saying it is, but i can't help seeing the connection...oh god! may _this_ is a
bad analogy. will it never end!!

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Herring
Sounds interesting. Link?

Not that we really need to analyze it. Theres 50 reasons why this is a bad
analogy.

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teeja
That which works well beats that which looks good.

Take quantum for example: When Dirac was asked, "What’s the answer to the
measurement problem?" his response was, Quantum mechanics is a provisional
theory.

