34 ms·

Linus Torvalds: Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder

783 points by DarkCrusader2 7y ago

buboard 7y ago
I don't know. I think he's just lucky. I only say this to motivate him.
Keyframe 7y ago
Not to take away from git, but would git be as successful if it wasn’t made by him? Mercurial did come out around the same time, no?
- notacoward 7y ago
  Mercurial, darcs, monotone, others. It was a popular area for a while. I think it's less about Linus wrote it than Linus used it (for the Linux kernel) though. If somebody else had written it and he'd used it, the outcome would have been the same.
  - hobofan 7y ago
    At least for darcs there was a technical/theoretical reason on why it didn't succeed.
    - gimboland 7y ago
      What was it? I used darcs quite a bit back when I used to write more haskell, but have lost touch over the last decade or so. What happened? I was always under the impression that one of the things that set darcs apart was that it had a theoretical basis. Did something go wrong with that?
      - hobofan 7y ago
        Darcs has the problem of exponential merges[0], where certain merges that would have a lot of conflicts takes an exponential amount of time (based on number of conflicts), which in practice can render certain patchsets unmergable. The authors of Pijul[1] found a solution for the exponential merge problem, and from what I've heard there have been discussions that darcs might in the future switch to Pijul's algorithm. [0]: http://darcs.net/FAQ/Performance#is-the-exponential-merge-problem-fixed-yet http://darcs.net/FAQ/Performance#is-the-exponential-merge-pr... [1]: https://pijul.org https://pijul.org
        brandmeyer 7y ago
        The irony here is that all of the large git projects I've worked on don't use merges at all. They cherry-pick and/or rebase their patches around.
        erikpukinskis 7y ago
        Yeah, I never merge. No idea why you would want to.
        gimboland 7y ago
        Cherry-picks can still lead to conflicts though, no? It's essentially just a particular kind of merge.
        brandmeyer 7y ago
        My mental model is that cherry-picks are like a copy by-value of one or more patches. A merge is a copy by-reference of a specific series of patches. It just so happens that what I usually want in practice is to make copies by-value. There are other integration workflows that make copies by-reference with dedicated merge commits. But my team's most common use case for long-lived branches is to track bugfixes for deployment to remote hardware separately from mainline development. So, by-value copies of small changes is much more common.
        gimboland 7y ago
  - gwd 7y ago
    > If somebody else had written it and he'd used it, the outcome would have been the same. IIRC, the mercurial project had already started when Linus started working on Git. (In fact, very early versions of Xen used BitKeeper, following suit with Linux; when the license changed, Xen moved over to mercurial because git wasn't ready yet, and stuck with it for a number of years.) The main reason Linus wasn't happy with mercurial was the performance -- Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with than nearly any other project on the planet, and even at the time, operations in mercurial took just a bit too long for Linus.
    - notacoward 7y ago
      > Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with Not really. I work with Mercurial every day, in a FAANG company's monorepo which is many many times the size of the Linux kernel. It's not always pleasant, but it's not clear git would be any better. Mercurial's performance issues are solvable, have been solved to a large degree, but IIRC when git started that was not the case. It's a shame really. The fragmentation is annoying sometimes, even if it's the result of historical accident rather than any bad decisions made at any particular moment in time.
      - tomlu 7y ago
        Don't you guys (which is definitely Facebook) use some sort of extensions that makes it not the same as a vanilla Mercurial repository?
- mark-r 7y ago
  The most important determinant to a product's success is who uses it. Given that git was guaranteed to be used for Linux, that success was assured no matter who the author was or how its technical features compared.
kresten 7y ago
Nothing more than linux is needed to prove the success of Linus Torvalds. If your first hit is sufficiently large you never need another. It's different in founding startups..., once you're lucky, twice you're good.
- mikelyons 7y ago
  Would notch be an example of this? Minecraft being what it is? I suppose it's too early to tell if he'll create any other software that compares but it seems at the moment that you could predict not.
empath75 7y ago
He’s probably responsible for more wealth creation than anybody in the last hundred years just from those two projects.
- cerberusss 7y ago
  And besides that, the total sum of intellectual development. I remember in my student years, first learning GNU userland, and then compiling a custom kernel, and finally pouring over kernel module code. There must be hundreds of thousands of me, hungry to try to understand what makes an OS tick.
  - naringas 7y ago
    Agreed 100%. I don't think I would work as a software professional if growing up I had to buy (or somehow finagle) computer manuals for closed-source systems in order to learn. Maybe I didn't read the code, but I learned so much by compiling it. Knowledge I wouldn't have bothered with had I just downloaded a binary blob.
- xamuel 7y ago
  It's really astonishing to see all the recent drama around GitHub/GitLab. Hard to believe those are multibillion dollar companies when their entire existence can be summed up as "Filling in some gaps in git". Like, if Linus Torvalds would just dedicate a few months and build that functionality directly into git, both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth. Edit: I mean, their value propositions to internal teams would disappear. They would still have value as social networks and as centralized hosting.
  - excalibur 7y ago
    GitHub is like half social network and half hosting service. I don't see these as features that should or could be built into git itself.
  - np_tedious 7y ago
    Idk if "gaps" is fair. Building a web UI into git would go quite against the "do one thing well" unix philosophy. And even then, hosting services would still be a thing
bhaak 7y ago
I would disagree that Linux is a one hit wonder. Years of successful project management are many small hits, not just one big hit.
- mschaef 7y ago
  Agreed... it's easy to envision scenarios where Linux would have fallen off completely back in the 90's. (After all, Linus' original goals were 'better than Minix' and 'learn about the 80386').
- gwd 7y ago
  > Years of successful project management are many small hits, not just one big hit. It sounds like maybe "one trick pony" might be closer to what Linus was getting at. Being a one trick pony is better than being a one-hit wonder, but Linus has shown he's got at least a couple of tricks. :-)
prepend 7y ago
We all know that subsurface [0] proved that (although made after git) as well as shows his naming skills are getting way better. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software)
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  wrt naming skills, not sure I follow; I think "git" and "linux" were great choices.
  - stevekemp 7y ago
    Though of course it should be noted that "linux" was not named by Linus. "Linux itself got its name from Ari Lemmke who ran the FTP server the original Linux Kernel was uploaded to. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, wanted to name the kernel Freax, but Ari instead gave him a folder called “linux” to upload his kernel to"
  - TallGuyShort 7y ago
    In British English, to call someone a 'git' is an insult. That's what is being referred to. Linus once joked that both Linux and Git were named after him.
  - IshKebab 7y ago
    Imagine if he named it `dick`. That's what it sounds like to English people, more or less. It wasn't an accident. Maybe not the best name choice.
    - paulddraper 7y ago
      Except git is a homophone for "get", a word said quite regularly, and relevant to VCS. IDK what "dick" sounds like. A man's first name?
      - IshKebab 7y ago
        That's not why it's called `git`, that's the first time I've ever heard anyone draw a connection between `git` and "get", and they are only homophones in some regional American accents.
hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
I think it's kind of weird that they left out any mention of BitKeeper in this article. The whole impetus for git (someone correct me if I'm wrong): 1. Linux source was hosted on BitKeeper before git. It basically was one of the first distributed source control systems (or the first? not sure if anything predated it). 2. Linux devs got into conflict with the BitKeeper owner over open-sourcing and reverse engineering, so Linus realized they needed a new system because no other source control system had the features they needed like BitKeeper had (mainly, I understand, the distributed repos). So basically, Linux is to Unix like git is to BitKeeper (roughly).
- Someone1234 7y ago
  I've never used BitKeeper. How much of Git's design is "inspired" by BitKeeper/how similar are they? Particularly at a file format/low level.
  - zorked 7y ago
    If anything they are as different as possible. And part of that was to avoid legal problems with BK.
  - xorcist 7y ago
    BitKeeper was created in large parts to fit Linux and Linus came with a lot of feedback to McVoy. Perhaps even took part in the original design? Someone who can remember can surely fill in. I never really used it, but I expect there to be some shared ideas for those reasons.
    - beagle3 7y ago
      BitKeeper was distributed sccs on steroids, but kept true to its sccs heritage -- as tridge had demonstrated when he "reverse engineered" BK by telneting to the server and typing "HELP" (and following examples from it). SCCS is a single-file revision management system, which inspired RCS (but they are not compatible IIRC; one keeps changes forward and the other backwards). CVS was a management system on top of RCS to provide "repository-wide" actions and branches. SVN was supposed to be "CVS done right". git is a blockhain/dag content addressable storage, inspired and borrowing a lot from monotone (a system created by Graydon Hoare who later went to create rust; Linus credits monotone and graydon for inspiring the design of git, which is essentially monotone but much simplified). McVoy and Linus did, in many ways, collaborate on making BitKeeper more comfortable for Linus and Linux development; but the design and implementation of BitKeeper predates that and goes back to SCCS through TeamWare, and maybe even farther.
andy_ppp 7y ago
Yes, I always wondered about the database technology that I heard Linus talk about around the time Git came out. It's probably another area where someone with a visionary view of how software should work would lead to something quite useful.
- jlokier 7y ago
  I'm intrigued, and interested in database technology. Do you have any links or pointers?
pjungwir 7y ago
I saw a talk in 2010 by Mark Dominus (who sometimes comments here) titled "Linus Torvald's Greatest Invention". It was about git! It was a fun talk. Here is a link if anyone is interested: https://blog.plover.com/misc/git-talk.html https://blog.plover.com/misc/git-talk.html
yiyus 7y ago
Both Linux and Git look like obvious solutions that anyone could have come up with. That's what makes a discovery or a product great. That's why I think Linus is simply a genius.
- buboard 7y ago
  > look like obvious solutions ex post facto
- wil421 7y ago
  IMHO, the best and most disruptive inventions are ones where almost everyone could’ve said “Hey I should have thought of X, it’s such a simple idea.”
jpm_sd 7y ago
Even Linus suffers from imposter syndrome? Never would have thought. If Linux was a "one-hit wonder" it's been topping the charts for decades...
- deadbunny 7y ago
  If the first man on the moon can feel it[1], anyone can. 1. https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-that-youve-dealt-with-with-impostor https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-t...
moonbug 7y ago
it's GitHub that makes git popular
- gamegod 7y ago
  Git was popular before GitHub was a thing. Git was taking over the open source world back when everybody was on SVN, and people were just hosting their Git repos themselves. GitHub made Git ubiquitous for all types of developers and accelerated that adoption further, giving us the near-monopoly we see today.
  - pjmlp 7y ago
    Being the SCM to interact with Linux development was kind of killer application for got.
  - jcranmer 7y ago
    A better statement is that Github rather killed the momentum of Mercurial, which was also picking up steam in that era (Python, OpenJDK, and Mozilla all chose Mercurial over git).
- ulkesh 7y ago
  Not to assume, but that sounds like a comment from someone who only uses GitHub for interacting with git. I agree that GitHub helped spread the popularity of git, but I hesitate to say with absolution that it's the only thing that makes git popular. Anecdotally... When I first began my git adventures, nearly 10 years ago, I was extremely apprehensive. I knew SVN. I liked SVN. I had no reason to go elsewhere. And then I tried git (albeit using a GUI at the time), and it didn't click. So I went back to SVN. Later, after being forced to use git for a project at work, I started to understand what makes it special. I finally felt I had a version control system/tool that I could trust without being so hands-on like I was with SVN. Put simply -- git _just_ works. The concepts take time to really grasp (rebase versus merge, reflog, etc), but once grasped, it becomes very easy to see why it is so popular. I now use git locally as much as I use it with a hosted repository (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc). I use both command line and GUIs, and I thoroughly enjoy being able to trust git so completely.
tambourine_man 7y ago
If not for the BitKeeper drama, we wouldn't have Git. Same for Hurd, if GNU had a kernel back then, we wouldn't have Linux. What else could we take away from Trovalds in order to push him to his next project? :)
- bronson 7y ago
  A social network?
draw_down 7y ago
And it proved he’s not a UI designer.
cmarschner 7y ago
To me the beauty of git stems from the fact that it is an implementation of a functional data structure. It‘s a tree index that is read-only, and updating it involves creating a complete copy of the tree and giving it a new name. Then the only challenge is to make that copy as cheap as possible - for which the tree lends itself, as only the nodes on the path to the root need to get updated. As a result, you get lock-free transactions (branches) and minimal overhead. And through git‘s pointer-to-parent commit you get full lineage. It is so beautiful in fact that when I think about systems that need to maintain long-running state in concurrent environments, my first reaction is ”split up the state into files, and maintain it through git(hub)“.
- WhompingWindows 7y ago
  Wow, that is a beautiful post, thank you for writing it out that way...it makes me pine for VCS in my job. Can you or someone else reflect on my file system? I work for the government doing statistical analysis of healthcare data, and there is no VCS where I code, other than how you name the files and where you put them in folders and how you back them up manually. I am facing a major data-branching event where I'm going from ~40 scripts (R, SQL, STATA) on one dataset, to then three overlapping but different datasets and having ~100 scripts. I just don't know if my brain and wits are up to the task of maintaining these 3 branches with 3 different languages, given all I have is folder/file names and my knowledge reservoir and memory... I know this is a perfect use case for git, but I've never used it before and no one else in my department uses it. I don't know if I have the time and energy left at this job to implement a new system of VCS AND reproduce my code for 3 different-but-similar projects. Burnout approaches...
  - caymanjim 7y ago
    You can use Git on your own without anyone else being affected. It doesn't require a server to add benefit. Learn to work with it and then introduce your coworkers later.
    - akhilcacharya 7y ago
mrfusion 7y ago
What about all of us zero-hit wonders?
mrfusion 7y ago
I always wonder why open source kind of petered out. When it was all the rage I imagined it taking over other industries. Even moving out of just software.
panic 7y ago
I feel like Junio Hamano's name should be more attached to git than it is. He's been in charge of the project for most of its life but doesn't even get mentioned in articles like these.
weberc2 7y ago
I doubt Git would be popular without GitHub. Had the GH founders instead been more familiar with Mercurial, we would all be using the latter. Having used both extensively, I think we would all be better off in that alternate history, but such is life.
- clarus 7y ago
  As far as I remember, Git was already going strong at the time GitHub appeared. I was also a supporter of Mercurial at first, but I think Git won because: * it always was fast (written in C vs Python for Mercurial); * Linus and Linux are behind it.
hyperpallium 7y ago
esr described Linus's approach as "essentially simplifying" years before git... but that's exactly what git is (apart from the UI but we don't like to talk about that). http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...
viach 7y ago
After you become a wonder, everything you do is brilliant)
hevi_jos 7y ago
Oh my... I don't recognize Linus in the picture. We invited him to give a talk long time ago. Man, has he gotten fat.
gigatexal 7y ago
Lol @ that title. If the "only" thing to my name was the Linux kernel and the skills to make that happen and the quality that it is... I would consider myself an elite programmer.
mark_l_watson 7y ago
Great candor in Linus’ comment on not wanting to feel like a one hit wonder. I downloaded Linux on a 2400 baud modem, way back then. A big fan. I was unhappy to see Linus looking over weight and out of shape in that picture. I am 68 so I understand getting old, but I consider Linus to be a ‘world resource’ and I wish him well, health wise. His wife used to be a karate champion so he at least has an exercise expert at home.
mooneater 7y ago
I really wouldnt call Linux one hit. Linux is a universe. Its more like an entire discography or even genre now.
Vysero 7y ago
Does GIT have it's own bug tracking system? For instance, if I use SVN and Bugzilla can I kill two birds with one stone by switching to GIT?
- Raidion 7y ago
  Git does not, but most git hosts have that built in. If you host your git repo in GitHub, you'll use GitHub's built in tracking.
foreigner 7y ago
That's the first time I've heard Linus Torvalds described as "understated".
crispyambulance 7y ago
git certainly works and is a great technical achievement, but really Mr Torvalds should give thanks to Github for making git as popular as it has become-- it's not entirely his "hit".
- xxpor 7y ago
  Linux isn't his hit by that logic either, it's partially Slackware's and RedHat's. Almost nothing substantial was ever one person's doing.
Koshkin 7y ago
On the other hand, I can't help wondering what would have happened to Git had it been created by some low-profile programmer.
- jolmg 7y ago
  Probably wouldn't have become popular as quickly, but it still would have caught on, I'm sure. Don't most popular FOSS projects start with low-profile programmers?
qubex 7y ago
Even if he hadn’t conceived of Git, I can hardly see him going down in the history books as a “one hit wonder”. Maybe if he’d just conceived and programmed the early Linux kernels... but aside from Git, the work he’s put into architecting Linux and managing the enormous effort that goes into “managing the mainitainers” is simply breathtaking. And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta. And for the sake of not making this sound like hero worship, I still side with Tanenbaum when it comes to the monolithic kernel vs. micro-kernel debate... EDIT: corrected nonsensical double mention of ‘microkernel’.
- jolmg 7y ago
  > microkernel vs. microkernel debate For others that are not familiar, you mean the microkernel vs monolithic kernel debate.
  - qubex 7y ago
    Thanks for spotting that, corrected. “Monolithic kernel” apparently isn’t a term spellcheck takes kindly to, and I wasn’t paying enough attention...
- panpanna 7y ago
  > And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta. Not sure why this is always overlooked. The real-time code translation approach where you have a cisc front end but the code executs on a risc core was immediately copied by Intel (and sued for that). Without that technology we would still be doing 200 mhz at 200 watt.
  - earthscienceman 7y ago
    Can you explain in more detail what you mean? I literally know nothing about this
    - panpanna 7y ago
      Back then Intel was stuck with a classic CISC architecture that did not scale well. What transmeta did was to keep the x86 instruction set (CISC) but internally convert them to a simpler RISC-ish instruction set and run it in a much simpler and power effective RISC core. Intel copied this idea which allowed P4 (maybe already PIII?) to make a giant performance leap. Nowadays all high performance CISC CPUs from AMD and Intel do this.
guidoism 7y ago
It's funny but I've recently been thinking of him as "The Git guy" rather than "The Linux Guy". I honestly think that Git has the potential to be relevant a lot longer than Linux.
domlebo70 7y ago
Am I going nuts, or is that photo in the linked article, not of Linus?
- username90 7y ago
  That is him. He just ages and gets older like everyone else. https://lwn.net/Articles/799259/ https://lwn.net/Articles/799259/
cryptica 7y ago
It's important to note however that the main reason why Git became mainstream is because of GitHub. And GitHub chose Git because of two reasons: 1. It was affiliated with Linus Torvalds. 2. It had a catchy name. As far as I remember Mercurial had a much better UX. Compared to Mercurial, Git is over-complicated and a lot of the commands don't make sense (e.g. 'git checkout -b mybranchname' to make a new branch WTF?). In a way, it shows how superficial we are as a society; even among software developers.
- riquito 7y ago
  Git was already the scm of choice when Github selected it. It was faster than Mercurial (by far in some operations). At the time there was whygitisbetterthanx with benchmarks on various operations Edit: thanks webarchive https://web.archive.org/web/20081218003732/http://whygitisbetterthanx.com:80/#git-is-fast https://web.archive.org/web/20081218003732/http://whygitisbe...
- AceJohnny2 7y ago
  Alternatively, Github became successful thanks to the git's feature set.
  - cryptica 7y ago
    I really don't buy this idea that features and quality of a project are what drives adoption. Hype, social connections and funding is what drives adoption, features is what follows (sometimes) once good engineers start to join the company (as a result of all the hype) but features and quality have very little to do with success.
jw14 7y ago
No. Git did not prove that Linus could more more than a one-hit wonder. It proved halo effect is real. Mercurial had a better interface and early on was equal or better (as far as I know) for most things. Everyone went with Git because Linus made it. I think it also might have been faster for huge code bases... but that pretty much only affects the kernel team and a handful of others. Your standard CRUD app could easily use a slower VCS without noticing. Instead of going on merits, everyone just followed Linus. Which is what always happens in technology communities. Everyone just does whatever some guy at the front is doing.
- randomsearch 7y ago
  As much as I agree with how terrible the interface of git is, the internals of git are very good.
- dan-robertson 7y ago
  I think the quality of GitHub compared to other code hosting systems is probably why git is so popular. Mercurial is still used in plenty of places (eg Mozilla, Facebook). And integrating with GitHub/other things which are integrated with GitHub seems like a major factor which convinced open source projects to start with/switch to git.
  - jw14 7y ago
    That's a good point. Although Mercurial had Bitbucket. Was GitHub that much better? Or was it network effect of everyone on GitHub? (sincere question, I don't know)
- scrollaway 7y ago
  I was there when the winner was still unclear and this is complete nonsense. Very few people even knew git was from Torvalds. Git started winning people over because mercurial was atrociously slow. The real nail in the coffin was GitHub which truly was revolutionary. Nothing else really played a part.
  - 7y ago
umbs 7y ago
> In an impressively candid moment of self-reflection, Torvalds said the impetus behind Git was to prove to himself that he wasn't just a "one-hit wonder." "We all have self-doubts," he suggested. "Linux was 'just' a re-implementation of Unix. Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder." Wow! Even Linus has some form of 'impostor syndrome' and self-doubt after all the technical achievements.
nightnight 7y ago
Great subject: I bet that 95% of successful people are one hit wonders. I mean, they got once lucky and can live of the capital of their one hit wonder but can't repeat this a second time. Hence, don't respect/admire such people too much, they are the same avg frustrated chump from time to time like you are. With as many worries.
teekert 7y ago
Git is one of those thing that you hate a first, then accept, then start to appreciate and the you become evangelical about it. A true work of genius.
codr7 7y ago
Source control was simply painful before git. I remember desperately trying to get Subversion to compile and work way back in the days, because even though it was barely limping along it still looked like a way out of the hell that is proprietary, corporate source control. I then went on to use subversion for a long time in different settings. Up until the day I finally tried git. This is not about centralized vs. distributed, it's simply superior software, period. Nothing else I've tried even comes close.
peeters 7y ago
> The world rightly lauds Linus Torvalds for Linux, but Git will arguably have a bigger impact. That's a pretty bold statement. Git might be almost ubiquitous these days, but if you erased git from the world, the ripples would be much less due to the plethora of alternatives out there. There's no reason to think that things like Github wouldn't have evolved with alternative VCSs. Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool and improves the QoL of developers, but it's hard to think about any dev not being able to do their job without it.
adultSwim 7y ago
The article falsely makes it sounds that Torvalds wants us all to comment our code.
tunesmith 7y ago
This is admittedly more along the lines of fever-dream thinking, but I've thought more than once how it would be interesting to have a programming language that actually encodes the "Why" as well as the what/how. Complete with type safety, like maybe you'd have to ensure that your various business reasons for encoding a particular function are still true, and otherwise it wouldn't compile.
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
Just a two-hit wonder
swalberg 7y ago
Linus also wrote a successful Scuba dive logging and planning tool called Subsurface (https://subsurface-divelog.org/ https://subsurface-divelog.org/) that has a cross platform desktop edition and mobile editions. Like git, he started it as a way to scratch his own itch, and now it's mostly supported by the community. It has support for most dive computers and does full technical dive planning with mixed gasses.
elipsey 7y ago
linus looks more tux every year XD i once had a job at a state agency that was conservative enough to use CVS and subversion, so i got to see what the bad old days were like. i'm so glad git exists. “I’m an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First ‘Linux’, now ‘Git’” --https://websetnet.net/microsoft-now-using-linus-torvalds-open-source-tool-windows-development/ https://websetnet.net/microsoft-now-using-linus-torvalds-ope...
stjohnswarts 7y ago
He's not wrong.
RickJWagner 7y ago
I put Linus (with Linux and Git) way up at the top of the spectrum. Maybe Pike, Thompson and Ritchie are at this level. A bit lower are other multi-hit inventors. Gavin King, inventor or Hibernate and Seam, is in this list. Everybody else comes third. It's great to invent something useful. (A singleton.) As a software maintenance engineer, I recognize great maintenance engineers in this category, too. I am deeply impressed by Torvalds. Git and Linux are huge.
RickJWagner 7y ago
Yeah, Linus is up among the greats. Linux and Git are huge. Pike, Thompson and Ritchie are in the same league. Not many others, maybe none. A level below that, people like Gavin King. He invented Hibernate and Seam, not too shabby. (But not like Linux.) A level below that, the rest of us mortals. I know quite a few one-hit authors (they're good) and some maintenance wizard, but it's nothing like inventing multiple super-hits. Hats off to Linus.
oneepic 7y ago
(Kneejerk reaction to this headline) I feel like >90% people are zero-hit wonders by this kind of standard. Maybe we have a good career, a good family, good friendships, travel to a lot of places, or whatever other interests we pursue. but how many of us are going to write much-loved software that is in wide use for decades?
m0zg 7y ago
Given that 99.99% of people are "zero hit" wonders, it's ok to be a "one hit wonder", Linus.
hatsunearu 7y ago
Is that picture right? He doesn't look like Linus...
pixelkritzel 7y ago
Linus Torvald just won the Impostor Syndrome championship. He would never admit though ...

783 points by DarkCrusader2 7y ago

I don't know. I think he's just lucky. I only say this to motivate him.

Not to take away from git, but would git be as successful if it wasn’t made by him? Mercurial did come out around the same time, no?

notacoward 7y ago
Mercurial, darcs, monotone, others. It was a popular area for a while. I think it's less about Linus wrote it than Linus used it (for the Linux kernel) though. If somebody else had written it and he'd used it, the outcome would have been the same.
- hobofan 7y ago
  At least for darcs there was a technical/theoretical reason on why it didn't succeed.
  - gimboland 7y ago
    What was it? I used darcs quite a bit back when I used to write more haskell, but have lost touch over the last decade or so. What happened? I was always under the impression that one of the things that set darcs apart was that it had a theoretical basis. Did something go wrong with that?
    - hobofan 7y ago
      Darcs has the problem of exponential merges[0], where certain merges that would have a lot of conflicts takes an exponential amount of time (based on number of conflicts), which in practice can render certain patchsets unmergable. The authors of Pijul[1] found a solution for the exponential merge problem, and from what I've heard there have been discussions that darcs might in the future switch to Pijul's algorithm. [0]: http://darcs.net/FAQ/Performance#is-the-exponential-merge-problem-fixed-yet http://darcs.net/FAQ/Performance#is-the-exponential-merge-pr... [1]: https://pijul.org https://pijul.org
      - brandmeyer 7y ago
        The irony here is that all of the large git projects I've worked on don't use merges at all. They cherry-pick and/or rebase their patches around.
        erikpukinskis 7y ago
        Yeah, I never merge. No idea why you would want to.
        gimboland 7y ago
        Cherry-picks can still lead to conflicts though, no? It's essentially just a particular kind of merge.
        brandmeyer 7y ago
        My mental model is that cherry-picks are like a copy by-value of one or more patches. A merge is a copy by-reference of a specific series of patches. It just so happens that what I usually want in practice is to make copies by-value. There are other integration workflows that make copies by-reference with dedicated merge commits. But my team's most common use case for long-lived branches is to track bugfixes for deployment to remote hardware separately from mainline development. So, by-value copies of small changes is much more common.
      - gimboland 7y ago
- gwd 7y ago
  > If somebody else had written it and he'd used it, the outcome would have been the same. IIRC, the mercurial project had already started when Linus started working on Git. (In fact, very early versions of Xen used BitKeeper, following suit with Linux; when the license changed, Xen moved over to mercurial because git wasn't ready yet, and stuck with it for a number of years.) The main reason Linus wasn't happy with mercurial was the performance -- Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with than nearly any other project on the planet, and even at the time, operations in mercurial took just a bit too long for Linus.
  - notacoward 7y ago
    > Linux just has far far more commits and files to deal with Not really. I work with Mercurial every day, in a FAANG company's monorepo which is many many times the size of the Linux kernel. It's not always pleasant, but it's not clear git would be any better. Mercurial's performance issues are solvable, have been solved to a large degree, but IIRC when git started that was not the case. It's a shame really. The fragmentation is annoying sometimes, even if it's the result of historical accident rather than any bad decisions made at any particular moment in time.
    - tomlu 7y ago
      Don't you guys (which is definitely Facebook) use some sort of extensions that makes it not the same as a vanilla Mercurial repository?
mark-r 7y ago
The most important determinant to a product's success is who uses it. Given that git was guaranteed to be used for Linux, that success was assured no matter who the author was or how its technical features compared.

kresten 7y ago

Nothing more than linux is needed to prove the success of Linus Torvalds. If your first hit is sufficiently large you never need another. It's different in founding startups..., once you're lucky, twice you're good.

mikelyons 7y ago
Would notch be an example of this? Minecraft being what it is? I suppose it's too early to tell if he'll create any other software that compares but it seems at the moment that you could predict not.

empath75 7y ago

He’s probably responsible for more wealth creation than anybody in the last hundred years just from those two projects.

cerberusss 7y ago
And besides that, the total sum of intellectual development. I remember in my student years, first learning GNU userland, and then compiling a custom kernel, and finally pouring over kernel module code. There must be hundreds of thousands of me, hungry to try to understand what makes an OS tick.
- naringas 7y ago
  Agreed 100%. I don't think I would work as a software professional if growing up I had to buy (or somehow finagle) computer manuals for closed-source systems in order to learn. Maybe I didn't read the code, but I learned so much by compiling it. Knowledge I wouldn't have bothered with had I just downloaded a binary blob.
xamuel 7y ago
It's really astonishing to see all the recent drama around GitHub/GitLab. Hard to believe those are multibillion dollar companies when their entire existence can be summed up as "Filling in some gaps in git". Like, if Linus Torvalds would just dedicate a few months and build that functionality directly into git, both those companies' value propositions would fall off the face of the earth. Edit: I mean, their value propositions to internal teams would disappear. They would still have value as social networks and as centralized hosting.
- excalibur 7y ago
  GitHub is like half social network and half hosting service. I don't see these as features that should or could be built into git itself.
- np_tedious 7y ago
  Idk if "gaps" is fair. Building a web UI into git would go quite against the "do one thing well" unix philosophy. And even then, hosting services would still be a thing

bhaak 7y ago

I would disagree that Linux is a one hit wonder. Years of successful project management are many small hits, not just one big hit.

mschaef 7y ago
Agreed... it's easy to envision scenarios where Linux would have fallen off completely back in the 90's. (After all, Linus' original goals were 'better than Minix' and 'learn about the 80386').
gwd 7y ago
> Years of successful project management are many small hits, not just one big hit. It sounds like maybe "one trick pony" might be closer to what Linus was getting at. Being a one trick pony is better than being a one-hit wonder, but Linus has shown he's got at least a couple of tricks. :-)

prepend 7y ago

We all know that subsurface [0] proved that (although made after git) as well as shows his naming skills are getting way better. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsurface_(software)

chrisweekly 7y ago
wrt naming skills, not sure I follow; I think "git" and "linux" were great choices.
- stevekemp 7y ago
  Though of course it should be noted that "linux" was not named by Linus. "Linux itself got its name from Ari Lemmke who ran the FTP server the original Linux Kernel was uploaded to. Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, wanted to name the kernel Freax, but Ari instead gave him a folder called “linux” to upload his kernel to"
- TallGuyShort 7y ago
  In British English, to call someone a 'git' is an insult. That's what is being referred to. Linus once joked that both Linux and Git were named after him.
- IshKebab 7y ago
  Imagine if he named it `dick`. That's what it sounds like to English people, more or less. It wasn't an accident. Maybe not the best name choice.
  - paulddraper 7y ago
    Except git is a homophone for "get", a word said quite regularly, and relevant to VCS. IDK what "dick" sounds like. A man's first name?
    - IshKebab 7y ago
      That's not why it's called `git`, that's the first time I've ever heard anyone draw a connection between `git` and "get", and they are only homophones in some regional American accents.

hn_throwaway_99 7y ago

I think it's kind of weird that they left out any mention of BitKeeper in this article. The whole impetus for git (someone correct me if I'm wrong): 1. Linux source was hosted on BitKeeper before git. It basically was one of the first distributed source control systems (or the first? not sure if anything predated it). 2. Linux devs got into conflict with the BitKeeper owner over open-sourcing and reverse engineering, so Linus realized they needed a new system because no other source control system had the features they needed like BitKeeper had (mainly, I understand, the distributed repos). So basically, Linux is to Unix like git is to BitKeeper (roughly).

Someone1234 7y ago
I've never used BitKeeper. How much of Git's design is "inspired" by BitKeeper/how similar are they? Particularly at a file format/low level.
- zorked 7y ago
  If anything they are as different as possible. And part of that was to avoid legal problems with BK.
- xorcist 7y ago
  BitKeeper was created in large parts to fit Linux and Linus came with a lot of feedback to McVoy. Perhaps even took part in the original design? Someone who can remember can surely fill in. I never really used it, but I expect there to be some shared ideas for those reasons.
  - beagle3 7y ago
    BitKeeper was distributed sccs on steroids, but kept true to its sccs heritage -- as tridge had demonstrated when he "reverse engineered" BK by telneting to the server and typing "HELP" (and following examples from it). SCCS is a single-file revision management system, which inspired RCS (but they are not compatible IIRC; one keeps changes forward and the other backwards). CVS was a management system on top of RCS to provide "repository-wide" actions and branches. SVN was supposed to be "CVS done right". git is a blockhain/dag content addressable storage, inspired and borrowing a lot from monotone (a system created by Graydon Hoare who later went to create rust; Linus credits monotone and graydon for inspiring the design of git, which is essentially monotone but much simplified). McVoy and Linus did, in many ways, collaborate on making BitKeeper more comfortable for Linus and Linux development; but the design and implementation of BitKeeper predates that and goes back to SCCS through TeamWare, and maybe even farther.

andy_ppp 7y ago

Yes, I always wondered about the database technology that I heard Linus talk about around the time Git came out. It's probably another area where someone with a visionary view of how software should work would lead to something quite useful.

jlokier 7y ago
I'm intrigued, and interested in database technology. Do you have any links or pointers?

pjungwir 7y ago

I saw a talk in 2010 by Mark Dominus (who sometimes comments here) titled "Linus Torvald's Greatest Invention". It was about git! It was a fun talk. Here is a link if anyone is interested: https://blog.plover.com/misc/git-talk.html https://blog.plover.com/misc/git-talk.html

yiyus 7y ago

Both Linux and Git look like obvious solutions that anyone could have come up with. That's what makes a discovery or a product great. That's why I think Linus is simply a genius.

buboard 7y ago
> look like obvious solutions ex post facto
wil421 7y ago
IMHO, the best and most disruptive inventions are ones where almost everyone could’ve said “Hey I should have thought of X, it’s such a simple idea.”

jpm_sd 7y ago

Even Linus suffers from imposter syndrome? Never would have thought. If Linux was a "one-hit wonder" it's been topping the charts for decades...

deadbunny 7y ago
If the first man on the moon can feel it[1], anyone can. 1. https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-that-youve-dealt-with-with-impostor https://neil-gaiman.tumblr.com/post/160603396711/hi-i-read-t...

moonbug 7y ago

it's GitHub that makes git popular

gamegod 7y ago
Git was popular before GitHub was a thing. Git was taking over the open source world back when everybody was on SVN, and people were just hosting their Git repos themselves. GitHub made Git ubiquitous for all types of developers and accelerated that adoption further, giving us the near-monopoly we see today.
- pjmlp 7y ago
  Being the SCM to interact with Linux development was kind of killer application for got.
- jcranmer 7y ago
  A better statement is that Github rather killed the momentum of Mercurial, which was also picking up steam in that era (Python, OpenJDK, and Mozilla all chose Mercurial over git).
ulkesh 7y ago
Not to assume, but that sounds like a comment from someone who only uses GitHub for interacting with git. I agree that GitHub helped spread the popularity of git, but I hesitate to say with absolution that it's the only thing that makes git popular. Anecdotally... When I first began my git adventures, nearly 10 years ago, I was extremely apprehensive. I knew SVN. I liked SVN. I had no reason to go elsewhere. And then I tried git (albeit using a GUI at the time), and it didn't click. So I went back to SVN. Later, after being forced to use git for a project at work, I started to understand what makes it special. I finally felt I had a version control system/tool that I could trust without being so hands-on like I was with SVN. Put simply -- git _just_ works. The concepts take time to really grasp (rebase versus merge, reflog, etc), but once grasped, it becomes very easy to see why it is so popular. I now use git locally as much as I use it with a hosted repository (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc). I use both command line and GUIs, and I thoroughly enjoy being able to trust git so completely.

tambourine_man 7y ago

If not for the BitKeeper drama, we wouldn't have Git. Same for Hurd, if GNU had a kernel back then, we wouldn't have Linux. What else could we take away from Trovalds in order to push him to his next project? :)

bronson 7y ago
A social network?

draw_down 7y ago

And it proved he’s not a UI designer.

cmarschner 7y ago

To me the beauty of git stems from the fact that it is an implementation of a functional data structure. It‘s a tree index that is read-only, and updating it involves creating a complete copy of the tree and giving it a new name. Then the only challenge is to make that copy as cheap as possible - for which the tree lends itself, as only the nodes on the path to the root need to get updated. As a result, you get lock-free transactions (branches) and minimal overhead. And through git‘s pointer-to-parent commit you get full lineage. It is so beautiful in fact that when I think about systems that need to maintain long-running state in concurrent environments, my first reaction is ”split up the state into files, and maintain it through git(hub)“.

WhompingWindows 7y ago
Wow, that is a beautiful post, thank you for writing it out that way...it makes me pine for VCS in my job. Can you or someone else reflect on my file system? I work for the government doing statistical analysis of healthcare data, and there is no VCS where I code, other than how you name the files and where you put them in folders and how you back them up manually. I am facing a major data-branching event where I'm going from ~40 scripts (R, SQL, STATA) on one dataset, to then three overlapping but different datasets and having ~100 scripts. I just don't know if my brain and wits are up to the task of maintaining these 3 branches with 3 different languages, given all I have is folder/file names and my knowledge reservoir and memory... I know this is a perfect use case for git, but I've never used it before and no one else in my department uses it. I don't know if I have the time and energy left at this job to implement a new system of VCS AND reproduce my code for 3 different-but-similar projects. Burnout approaches...
- caymanjim 7y ago
  You can use Git on your own without anyone else being affected. It doesn't require a server to add benefit. Learn to work with it and then introduce your coworkers later.
  - akhilcacharya 7y ago

mrfusion 7y ago

What about all of us zero-hit wonders?

mrfusion 7y ago

I always wonder why open source kind of petered out. When it was all the rage I imagined it taking over other industries. Even moving out of just software.

panic 7y ago

I feel like Junio Hamano's name should be more attached to git than it is. He's been in charge of the project for most of its life but doesn't even get mentioned in articles like these.

weberc2 7y ago

I doubt Git would be popular without GitHub. Had the GH founders instead been more familiar with Mercurial, we would all be using the latter. Having used both extensively, I think we would all be better off in that alternate history, but such is life.

clarus 7y ago
As far as I remember, Git was already going strong at the time GitHub appeared. I was also a supporter of Mercurial at first, but I think Git won because: * it always was fast (written in C vs Python for Mercurial); * Linus and Linux are behind it.

hyperpallium 7y ago

esr described Linus's approach as "essentially simplifying" years before git... but that's exactly what git is (apart from the UI but we don't like to talk about that). http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ar01s04.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral...

viach 7y ago

After you become a wonder, everything you do is brilliant)

hevi_jos 7y ago

Oh my... I don't recognize Linus in the picture. We invited him to give a talk long time ago. Man, has he gotten fat.

gigatexal 7y ago

Lol @ that title. If the "only" thing to my name was the Linux kernel and the skills to make that happen and the quality that it is... I would consider myself an elite programmer.

mark_l_watson 7y ago

Great candor in Linus’ comment on not wanting to feel like a one hit wonder. I downloaded Linux on a 2400 baud modem, way back then. A big fan. I was unhappy to see Linus looking over weight and out of shape in that picture. I am 68 so I understand getting old, but I consider Linus to be a ‘world resource’ and I wish him well, health wise. His wife used to be a karate champion so he at least has an exercise expert at home.

mooneater 7y ago

I really wouldnt call Linux one hit. Linux is a universe. Its more like an entire discography or even genre now.

Vysero 7y ago

Does GIT have it's own bug tracking system? For instance, if I use SVN and Bugzilla can I kill two birds with one stone by switching to GIT?

Raidion 7y ago
Git does not, but most git hosts have that built in. If you host your git repo in GitHub, you'll use GitHub's built in tracking.

foreigner 7y ago

That's the first time I've heard Linus Torvalds described as "understated".

crispyambulance 7y ago

git certainly works and is a great technical achievement, but really Mr Torvalds should give thanks to Github for making git as popular as it has become-- it's not entirely his "hit".

xxpor 7y ago
Linux isn't his hit by that logic either, it's partially Slackware's and RedHat's. Almost nothing substantial was ever one person's doing.

Koshkin 7y ago

On the other hand, I can't help wondering what would have happened to Git had it been created by some low-profile programmer.

jolmg 7y ago
Probably wouldn't have become popular as quickly, but it still would have caught on, I'm sure. Don't most popular FOSS projects start with low-profile programmers?

qubex 7y ago

Even if he hadn’t conceived of Git, I can hardly see him going down in the history books as a “one hit wonder”. Maybe if he’d just conceived and programmed the early Linux kernels... but aside from Git, the work he’s put into architecting Linux and managing the enormous effort that goes into “managing the mainitainers” is simply breathtaking. And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta. And for the sake of not making this sound like hero worship, I still side with Tanenbaum when it comes to the monolithic kernel vs. micro-kernel debate... EDIT: corrected nonsensical double mention of ‘microkernel’.

jolmg 7y ago
> microkernel vs. microkernel debate For others that are not familiar, you mean the microkernel vs monolithic kernel debate.
- qubex 7y ago
  Thanks for spotting that, corrected. “Monolithic kernel” apparently isn’t a term spellcheck takes kindly to, and I wasn’t paying enough attention...
panpanna 7y ago
> And I, for one, have not forgotten the rather impressive work he did at Transmeta. Not sure why this is always overlooked. The real-time code translation approach where you have a cisc front end but the code executs on a risc core was immediately copied by Intel (and sued for that). Without that technology we would still be doing 200 mhz at 200 watt.
- earthscienceman 7y ago
  Can you explain in more detail what you mean? I literally know nothing about this
  - panpanna 7y ago
    Back then Intel was stuck with a classic CISC architecture that did not scale well. What transmeta did was to keep the x86 instruction set (CISC) but internally convert them to a simpler RISC-ish instruction set and run it in a much simpler and power effective RISC core. Intel copied this idea which allowed P4 (maybe already PIII?) to make a giant performance leap. Nowadays all high performance CISC CPUs from AMD and Intel do this.

guidoism 7y ago

It's funny but I've recently been thinking of him as "The Git guy" rather than "The Linux Guy". I honestly think that Git has the potential to be relevant a lot longer than Linux.

domlebo70 7y ago

Am I going nuts, or is that photo in the linked article, not of Linus?

username90 7y ago
That is him. He just ages and gets older like everyone else. https://lwn.net/Articles/799259/ https://lwn.net/Articles/799259/

cryptica 7y ago

It's important to note however that the main reason why Git became mainstream is because of GitHub. And GitHub chose Git because of two reasons: 1. It was affiliated with Linus Torvalds. 2. It had a catchy name. As far as I remember Mercurial had a much better UX. Compared to Mercurial, Git is over-complicated and a lot of the commands don't make sense (e.g. 'git checkout -b mybranchname' to make a new branch WTF?). In a way, it shows how superficial we are as a society; even among software developers.

riquito 7y ago
Git was already the scm of choice when Github selected it. It was faster than Mercurial (by far in some operations). At the time there was whygitisbetterthanx with benchmarks on various operations Edit: thanks webarchive https://web.archive.org/web/20081218003732/http://whygitisbetterthanx.com:80/#git-is-fast https://web.archive.org/web/20081218003732/http://whygitisbe...
AceJohnny2 7y ago
Alternatively, Github became successful thanks to the git's feature set.
- cryptica 7y ago
  I really don't buy this idea that features and quality of a project are what drives adoption. Hype, social connections and funding is what drives adoption, features is what follows (sometimes) once good engineers start to join the company (as a result of all the hype) but features and quality have very little to do with success.

jw14 7y ago

No. Git did not prove that Linus could more more than a one-hit wonder. It proved halo effect is real. Mercurial had a better interface and early on was equal or better (as far as I know) for most things. Everyone went with Git because Linus made it. I think it also might have been faster for huge code bases... but that pretty much only affects the kernel team and a handful of others. Your standard CRUD app could easily use a slower VCS without noticing. Instead of going on merits, everyone just followed Linus. Which is what always happens in technology communities. Everyone just does whatever some guy at the front is doing.

randomsearch 7y ago
As much as I agree with how terrible the interface of git is, the internals of git are very good.
dan-robertson 7y ago
I think the quality of GitHub compared to other code hosting systems is probably why git is so popular. Mercurial is still used in plenty of places (eg Mozilla, Facebook). And integrating with GitHub/other things which are integrated with GitHub seems like a major factor which convinced open source projects to start with/switch to git.
- jw14 7y ago
  That's a good point. Although Mercurial had Bitbucket. Was GitHub that much better? Or was it network effect of everyone on GitHub? (sincere question, I don't know)
scrollaway 7y ago
I was there when the winner was still unclear and this is complete nonsense. Very few people even knew git was from Torvalds. Git started winning people over because mercurial was atrociously slow. The real nail in the coffin was GitHub which truly was revolutionary. Nothing else really played a part.
- 7y ago

umbs 7y ago

> In an impressively candid moment of self-reflection, Torvalds said the impetus behind Git was to prove to himself that he wasn't just a "one-hit wonder." "We all have self-doubts," he suggested. "Linux was 'just' a re-implementation of Unix. Git proved I could be more than a one-hit wonder." Wow! Even Linus has some form of 'impostor syndrome' and self-doubt after all the technical achievements.

nightnight 7y ago

Great subject: I bet that 95% of successful people are one hit wonders. I mean, they got once lucky and can live of the capital of their one hit wonder but can't repeat this a second time. Hence, don't respect/admire such people too much, they are the same avg frustrated chump from time to time like you are. With as many worries.

teekert 7y ago

Git is one of those thing that you hate a first, then accept, then start to appreciate and the you become evangelical about it. A true work of genius.

codr7 7y ago

Source control was simply painful before git. I remember desperately trying to get Subversion to compile and work way back in the days, because even though it was barely limping along it still looked like a way out of the hell that is proprietary, corporate source control. I then went on to use subversion for a long time in different settings. Up until the day I finally tried git. This is not about centralized vs. distributed, it's simply superior software, period. Nothing else I've tried even comes close.

peeters 7y ago

> The world rightly lauds Linus Torvalds for Linux, but Git will arguably have a bigger impact. That's a pretty bold statement. Git might be almost ubiquitous these days, but if you erased git from the world, the ripples would be much less due to the plethora of alternatives out there. There's no reason to think that things like Github wouldn't have evolved with alternative VCSs. Don't get me wrong, it's a great tool and improves the QoL of developers, but it's hard to think about any dev not being able to do their job without it.

adultSwim 7y ago

The article falsely makes it sounds that Torvalds wants us all to comment our code.

tunesmith 7y ago

This is admittedly more along the lines of fever-dream thinking, but I've thought more than once how it would be interesting to have a programming language that actually encodes the "Why" as well as the what/how. Complete with type safety, like maybe you'd have to ensure that your various business reasons for encoding a particular function are still true, and otherwise it wouldn't compile.

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

Just a two-hit wonder

swalberg 7y ago

Linus also wrote a successful Scuba dive logging and planning tool called Subsurface (https://subsurface-divelog.org/ https://subsurface-divelog.org/) that has a cross platform desktop edition and mobile editions. Like git, he started it as a way to scratch his own itch, and now it's mostly supported by the community. It has support for most dive computers and does full technical dive planning with mixed gasses.

elipsey 7y ago

linus looks more tux every year XD i once had a job at a state agency that was conservative enough to use CVS and subversion, so i got to see what the bad old days were like. i'm so glad git exists. “I’m an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First ‘Linux’, now ‘Git’” --https://websetnet.net/microsoft-now-using-linus-torvalds-open-source-tool-windows-development/ https://websetnet.net/microsoft-now-using-linus-torvalds-ope...

stjohnswarts 7y ago

He's not wrong.

RickJWagner 7y ago

I put Linus (with Linux and Git) way up at the top of the spectrum. Maybe Pike, Thompson and Ritchie are at this level. A bit lower are other multi-hit inventors. Gavin King, inventor or Hibernate and Seam, is in this list. Everybody else comes third. It's great to invent something useful. (A singleton.) As a software maintenance engineer, I recognize great maintenance engineers in this category, too. I am deeply impressed by Torvalds. Git and Linux are huge.

RickJWagner 7y ago

Yeah, Linus is up among the greats. Linux and Git are huge. Pike, Thompson and Ritchie are in the same league. Not many others, maybe none. A level below that, people like Gavin King. He invented Hibernate and Seam, not too shabby. (But not like Linux.) A level below that, the rest of us mortals. I know quite a few one-hit authors (they're good) and some maintenance wizard, but it's nothing like inventing multiple super-hits. Hats off to Linus.

oneepic 7y ago

(Kneejerk reaction to this headline) I feel like >90% people are zero-hit wonders by this kind of standard. Maybe we have a good career, a good family, good friendships, travel to a lot of places, or whatever other interests we pursue. but how many of us are going to write much-loved software that is in wide use for decades?

m0zg 7y ago

Given that 99.99% of people are "zero hit" wonders, it's ok to be a "one hit wonder", Linus.

hatsunearu 7y ago

Is that picture right? He doesn't look like Linus...

pixelkritzel 7y ago

Linus Torvald just won the Impostor Syndrome championship. He would never admit though ...