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Comment by chunkyks | Hacker News Reader

No one has mentioned git yet.

It depends on what you think of as great, but the man has developed two of the biggest software items in the world. One that runs the entire internet, and one that runs most software development.

Just about everything, ever, that any given person has done, would have been done by someone else. Sure we'd be on bsd. Or we'd be using subversion or mercurial. Without Einstein, the same truths about physics exist and would eventually be discovered.

I don't know how you define great, But in terms of good for society, and breadth of impact, I have trouble imagining anyone who's done more in recent times

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If it weren't for linux I don't think git would have gotten much traction. Much of the inertia git overcame was because it was pulled alongside linux.

If it weren't for Linux, git wouldn't have existed; git was Torvalds scratching the itch that was needing a better way to manage the Linux source.

He's an outspoken detractor of subversion [1], and after bitkeeper went pear-shaped [2], two projects sprang into being around the same time, solving the problem: Git, and Mercurial [3]. Whichever you think is better, when Torvalds converged on git as the choice for the kernel, the rest of the world could but follow.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 [2] https://lwn.net/Articles/130746/ [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercurial

The world followed GitHub. Not Linux.

It was legitimately better than anything else at the time it was created. Linus did have the advantage that people listen to him, and not everything that is better succeeds. But it isn't just a case of his popularity. Technical excellence was involved.

Mercurial is often preferred to git on purely technical grounds, so there's plenty of room to disagree about git being the best at what it does.

I always thought of Mercurial as being better on UI grounds, never heard someone suggest it’s better technically.

You can get lucky on this scale once, but to do it twice is truly something special that leans very far away from luck and towards genius.

From what I’ve read from his own writings he has faults, but he certainly moved the world forwards more than most people that have existed.

Just think - every software engineer’s resume worth anything mentions Linux and Git. Pretty incredible.

> Just think - every software engineer’s resume worth anything mentions Linux and Git.

Should I mention those? I've always viewed that in the same vein as bragging about wpm in MS Word or something --- nearly everyone applying is good enough, and the rest can learn, so why waste precious page space on that over other more important information?

Yes. The job says "requires git", the first person filtering resumes doesn't know that if you've been working on software for ten years the of course you know git.

Also, not everyone knows git, or Linux.

If you're applying for a job that says you need experience with word, the put word on there

> Just think - every software engineer’s resume worth anything mentions Linux and Git.

This is noise on a resume, in my opinion. I'm going to be assuming familiarity with these in most circumstances.

I recognize that different markets have different tolerance for nonsense on resumes, though: I've never heard of anyone in Europe adding extra-curriculars and things like "Eagle Scout" (or analogs of it) on resumes, and it'd be almost embarrassing interviewing someone who did.

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