Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention

http://blog.plover.com/misc/git-talk.html

by draegtun • 16 years ago

83 27 16 years ago

blog.plover.com

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• 16 years ago

"conveniently controversial" aka link/flame bait

charlief• 16 years ago

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

kiba2• 16 years ago

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

mahmud3• 16 years ago

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.

flogic• 16 years ago

Really, Linus's greatest work is the organizing he's done. People can argue about how great Linux or Git are. What really stands out is the community focus on them. They've passed a technical threshold, where their community benefits completely outweigh any competition's technical benefits.

beza1e1• 16 years ago

We should be careful about words here. Invention, innovation and creation are all different things.

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.

gruseom• 16 years ago

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

randombit• 16 years ago

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.

JoelMcCracken• 16 years ago

I would have thought so. Hashes aren't so special as to warrant all that attention.

adambyrtek2• 16 years ago

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++.

lambda• 16 years ago

Well, one of the big problems in Monotone back in the day was that since they (we? I contributed a bit to Monotone, but was never a core contributor) broke people's repos several times with data integrity bugs, and so got very paranoid and added lots of slow integrity checks to make sure that didn't happen any more. Part of the reason for the breakage was that they were still experimenting with the basic representation of history, merge algorithms, and the like, and so had to do data migrations quite often, which sometimes introduced bugs.

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.

lucisferre2• 16 years ago

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.

wcoenen2• 16 years ago

Also, Mercurial 0.1 was released before git was usable: http://mercurial.selenic.com/wiki/Presentations?action=Attac...

All the ideas were already there. Somebody just wanted his damn DVCS to be written in C :-)

thristian• 16 years ago

I'm pretty sure the head Mercurial developer was subscribed to the Git mailing list and decided to build his own DVCS when he saw Git wasn't heading in the direction he wanted. Mercurial might have been released earlier, but it was definitely a reaction to Git rather than convergent evolution.

burgerbrain• 16 years ago

>Somebody just wanted his damn DVCS to be written in C :-)

Who can blame him?

Certainly nobody can criticize the decision these days and keep a straight face. Results speak louder than ideaology.

tzs• 16 years ago

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.

tuxychandru• 16 years ago

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.

Linus Torvalds' Greatest Invention

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