Linus Torvalds - a classic example of the love-it-or-hate-it type of person. Brilliant programmer, of course, and the father of one of the most extraordinary software projects in the world, but sometimes, he can be utterly arrogant any annoying, yet the other moment completely sensible and utterly spot-on in his statements. CBR listed the ten best Linus Torvalds quotes.
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Member since:2005-11-02
It's a huge monolithic "hacked" piece of SW when it should have been an "engineered" piece of SW.
Krreagan "
And here is Linus's response to that spurioius arguement (much loved by BSD bully boys):
"From: Linus Torvalds
Subject: Re: Coding style - a non-issue
Date: Fri, 30 Nov 2001 16:50:34 -0800 (PST)
On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
> I'm very interested too, though I'll have to agree with Larry
> that Linux really isn't going anywhere in particular and seems
> to be making progress through sheer luck.
Hey, that's not a bug, that's a FEATURE!
You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the
whole solar system is?
Guess what - it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car.
It's you. And me.
And think about how you and me actually came about - not through any
complex design.
Right. "sheer luck".
Well, sheer luck, AND:
- free availability and _crosspollination_ through sharing of "source
code", although biologists call it DNA.
- a rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad
versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd
(biologists often call this "survival of the fittest")
- massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")
I'm deadly serious: we humans have _never_ been able to replicate
something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural
selection did it without even thinking.
Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.
And don't EVER make the mistake that you can design something better than
what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a
feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence _much_ too much credit.
Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their
engineering practices or their coding style.
Linus"
This is one of Linus's great achievements introducing "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" into software development.
Member since:2006-02-15
It's a huge monolithic "hacked" piece of SW when it should have been an "engineered" piece of SW.
What is the difference between a "monolithic hacked piece of sw" and "engineered piece of sw"? Windows NT kernel too is a monolithic kernel, yet you aren't complaining about it. And what do you mean with "hacked"? The fact that it has been brought together by developers around the world for free instead of a company who has hired them to work on the kernel around the world? Just stating a fact doesn't make one design decision better or worse than an other, mostly because they are based on opinions or because they are suited for one task better than another one. So, Krreagan, please do explain in-depth what is wrong with the Linux kernel? Because if you fail to describe the real reasons WHY you think one or another feature is inferior to some other implementation then you are just trying to spread some bulls*it here and no one will believe you.
Member since:2007-09-08
Oh, not that argument again.
Centrally designed software just doesn't scale up to the number and diversity of developers the Linux kernel has. Hell, it doesn't actually work in virtually any large piece of software - you either end up spending 99% of the time managing things without doing any work, or you get the same kind of smaller-scale parallel development in different directions.
Member since:
2008-06-07
Can you be more specific what you don't like in the Linux kernel? I think you're wrong, I think Linus is a great architect, but the kernel is quite old large general low-level piece of software, and that means it can be a lot complicated. I think you're confusing ugliness from complexity and ugliness from bad design.