Git v0.0.1 might have been created in 10 days, and the foundational ideas were certainly excellent. And it's amazing that two of the biggest contributions to the world of software came from the same person.
> "So I’d like to stress that while it really came together in just about ten days or so (at which point I did my first kernel commit using git), it wasn’t like it was some kind of mad dash of coding. The actual amount of that early code is actually fairly small, it all depended on getting the basic ideas right. And that I had been mulling over for a while before the whole project started. I’d seen the problems others had. I’d seen what I wanted to avoid doing."
Not saying that he copied BitKeeper 1:1, but if you look at BitKeeper usage examples (http://www.bitkeeper.org/), they do look familiar, don't they? BTW, BitKeeper is now open source - and development seems to have largely ceased...
10 days of writing code is impressive, but there would many,many days of thinking that preceded it.
> He aimed to create a tool that was:
> Distributed: [...]
> Compatible: The new tool would incorporate as many features and workflows as BitKeeper.
> Secure: [...]
and there is another quote from Linus Torvalds contained in the article:
> 'Well, it was obviously designed for our workflow, so that is part of it. I’ve already mentioned the whole “distributed” part many times, but it bears repeating. But it was also designed to be efficient enough for a biggish project like Linux, and it was designed to do things that people considered “hard” before git – because those are the things I do every day.'
That's not that amazing at all, because the fame and weight of being the creator of the former led to the adoption of the other as it became the official version control management system on which Linux was developed. — These are not two independent results.
If someone completely unknown developed Git 0.01 in 10 days, it would probably have stayed relatively obscure, and the reason for it's quality is because it became so famous due to being tied with Linux, attracting many developers.
Are there any other examples that come even close?
Of course, that's all mostly because much of that was bundled with the original MSDOS.
Also, in terms of video games, a great deal of innovative techniques and games game from John D. Carmac, which of course also is a result from Id Software pushing it.
Bazaar and mercurial got created the same year as git. Before that it made you happy if people were using subversion instead of CVS.
Sure, if nobody knows about the project nobody will use it, but I think git stands on its own. If any medium project adopted it (and it seems likely that its author would be working on some other things too), I think it would spread.
Linux in particular started because a student made a task scheduler on his home computer with no real goal to make a Unixlike kernel, and it grew into it and it so happened that at the time there was a big vacuum for a free Unixlike kernel. kFreeBSD and kMinix were not yet free at that time, had they been, Linux would have no doubt stayed a hobby project.
Unless there are more examples of that than of a lack of prior success not leading to future success, it doesn't seem like counterevidence.
possibly one of the reasons why git could be successful is that linus quickly handed over development to someone else.
of the top of my head i can only think of a few people that created multiple wildly successful projects. donald knuth with his books and with TeX (and i am not sure if the books are considered wildly successful). richard stallman with emacs and gcc (and the GNU licenses), anders hejlsberg with turbo pascal, c# and maybe typescript.
if you look at everyone else, they usually have only one wildly successful project that they are known for.
here is a list of programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_programmers most there only have one project that is widely known. if they have multiple projects then most of those are smaller.