
Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention - draegtun
http://blog.plover.com/misc/git-talk.html
======
tzs
I personally know a dozen people who could have written the Linux kernel, at
around the time Linus wrote it. What none of them could have done, through, is
_manage_ the project when it took off the way Linus did.

I suspect 100 years from now, the place you will hear the name "Linus
Torvalds" the most will be in management classes in business and engineering
school. His actual software will be a footnote, merely the platform upon which
he demonstrated how to manage a large open source project. Kind of like Henry
Ford and the automobile--Ford made important contributions to the development
of the automobile itself, but it is his figuring out how to make the
automobile factory that is the main thing we remember him for.

------
randombit
Using an acyclic graph of chained hashes to represent change history has a
long history in revision control - it was used in Monotone (which Linus
considered as an option instead of writing git, but rejected as it was written
in C++), in OpenCM, in Xanadu, and probably in at least half a dozen other
systems I've never heard of.

~~~
adambyrtek
Small correction, Linus rejected Monotone because it had been horribly slow on
the huge Linux source tree. Git was focused on performance from the outset,
where Monotone cares more about integrity and correctness than speed.

That said, it's definitely true that Linux has strong and negative opinions on
C++.

~~~
lucisferre
I think you have to take what he has said about C++, or OO in general in
context. What he said (at least what I've read) was that C++ would never make
sense for the kernel, and his reasoning seems sound to me

I've always taken the opinion that OO makes sense where one needs the ability
to model abstract systems in a way that can express and even explain them
through the code. Modeling an computer doesn't require or benefit as much from
such abstractions.

~~~
adambyrtek
It's not only about kernel, see this thread from the Git mailing list:

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of
substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to
generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C
were to do _nothing_ but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be
a huge reason to use C."

[http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/57643...](http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.version-
control.git/57643/focus=57918)

~~~
lucisferre
And that may be a fair criticism of C++ specifically, I don't know I don't
really use it.

------
famousactress
I'm wondering what other folks think. I mean, as nicely as git's put
together.. there was precedence for it as well. It just seems conveniently
controversial to put git above Linux.

~~~
drats
"conveniently controversial" aka link/flame bait

------
charlief
Git may be more innovative, but Linux is hands-down Linus Torvalds' greatest
creation.

~~~
kiba
It did inspires ESR to write the Cathederal and the Bazaar.

~~~
mahmud
Linux inspired ESR's literary output the same way the invention of plastic
inspired the proliferation of lawn-ornaments.

The influence is there and non-negligible, but I can think of a billion other
things, far more useful and creative, that benefited the same.

~~~
8ren
I found CatB extremely useful. I've heard a lot of hate for esr's work, and
I'm curious about it. Perhaps it's just backlash, from his previous very high
popularity.

So, could you elaborate with specific criticisms of CatB?

~~~
mahmud
I think I can write more inspired criticism of cardboard, or styrofoam.
Please, let me do those instead.

Or just go to his blog and read the second article:

" _Regular readers of this blog are probably pretty clued in about my better-
known software projects – gpsd, fetchmail, giflib, libpng, INTERCAL, ncurses,
Battle for Wesnoth, Emacs VC and GUD modes, and the like._ "

The entire place is an altar to the man.

Even Stuxnet, the super interesting piece of industrial hacking. Even it
didn't escape ESR's blessing wand:

" _[My friend] incited me to blog by asking me the following question: “Would
you call the perpetrators of the Stuxnet worm `hackers’, rather than
crackers”?_ "

The entire security scene stood up in awe, given the combination of effort and
ingenuity. But not ESR, he found this an opportunity to play pope and bestow
titles.

~~~
kiba
If you have nothing to say but _ad hominem_ and calling his literacy output
cardboard without backing it up, maybe you should say nothing at all.

We now know that you hate ESR's self promoting behaviors, but where is the
substance?

~~~
mahmud
_ESR's self promoting behaviors_

The substance is lacking because I am not motivated enough to think harder
about the man's writing. Something switched in my head and one day I realized
he was the antithesis of the hacker-ethic he preaches. "Real Hackers", much
like the real Scotsmen, work silently, are under-appreciated, and often
unknown.

Having said that, it takes one to know one; given an audience the size of his,
I am 100% certain I would go on a similar journey of self-worship and rampant
"blow-hardery".

Ahhh! what wouldn't I do for unearned public recognition and a permanent
podium.

------
tuxychandru
Didn't Linus himself mention that bitkeeper was where Git's inspiration came
from? Just like UNIX, bitkeeper was proprietary but it did work out many
things for Git to use.

------
gruseom
I've wondered about that too (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=455864>).

