Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention
blog.plover.com
blog.plover.com
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.
That said, it's definitely true that Linux has strong and negative opinions on C++.
Git had the advantage that it could learn from Monotone's mistakes, and focus on speed, and not have to experiment as much since much of the basic design ideas were already there. Git also made several better architectural choices, I believe, going with a much more simple and stable repository format than Monotone had.
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.
"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...
All the ideas were already there. Somebody just wanted his damn DVCS to be written in C :-)
Git didn't exist yet at that point.
Who can blame him?
Certainly nobody can criticize the decision these days and keep a straight face. Results speak louder than ideaology.
I use git and I love that it's faster than Mercurial (a couple of years ago, I timed 'git log' at 1 second and 'hg log' at 13 seconds on same repo contents).
But precisely because it's written in hard-to-modify, hard-to-library-ize C code with several Linux dependencies (afaik), many companies are choosing Mercurial (Google, Kiln, Atalassian).
I can easily imagine a future where Mercurial has far more plugins/extensions than git (because it's easier to write Mercurial plugins) which will be a huge advantage in Mercurial's favour (a la Firefox). For such reasons, it's likely I will switch to hg one of these days.
It may only be a matter of time before Mercurial catches up with git's performance and becomes the de-facto standard, and git is relegated to the Linux kernel and other early adopters.
Other than the index all my git knowledge directly translated to Mercurial. I myself am planning to switch as soon as I can overcome inertia and go through one of the tutorial.
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.
So, could you elaborate with specific criticisms of CatB?
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.
We now know that you hate ESR's self promoting behaviors, but where is the substance?
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.
Linux and git are both innovations, as they made known concepts (Unix kernel, DVCS) useable by the masses. They are hardly inventions, because they did not present new ideas or concepts. If they are creations ist debatable. Linus himself says Linux has "evolved", which means there is no specific creator, hence no creation. On the other hand git is (initially) completely created by Linus.