9 ms·

These guys look like being advocates of mediocrity. I haven't seen such radical egalitarianism promotion even from junior managers. I especially disliked the m

by alavrik 17y ago

These guys look like being advocates of mediocrity. I haven't seen such radical egalitarianism promotion even from junior managers. I especially disliked the moment when they interrupted the criticizer who was talking that there are a lot of evidences of geniuses existence and highly productive programmers in particular. And rather than advising to learn from the best programmers, they are advising to learn from ephemeral "community" and trimming ones ego and ambitions.

jrockway 17y ago
These guys look like being advocates of mediocrity. Yup. They wrote Subversion and continue to encourage people to use it. Perhaps they should tone down their egos and realize that Subversion was not really that great of an idea, and there are now several competing tools that do everything Subversion does, but better.
- gchpaco 17y ago
  A lot of the problems SVN ran into was trying to use cutting edge technology and standards before they were really ripe. WebDAV, for example, or the endless, endless iterations of Berkeley DB corruption. It is, in a lot of ways, an excellent illustration of the dangers of trying to solve the wrong problem.
  - rimantas 17y ago
    Linus was making fun of SVN in his talk ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 ). One of his point was, that SVN chose the wrong way right from the start and there is no way to have "CVS done right" because CVS is hopeless by design.
    - absconditus 17y ago
      CVS may have had serious flaws, but I find Linus' original revision control practices to be less than optimal: "The Linux kernel source code used to be maintained without the help of an automated source code management system, mostly because of Linus Torvalds' dislike of centralized SCM systems. In 2002, Linux kernel development switched to BitKeeper, a SCM system which satisfied Linus Torvalds' technical requirements." Nearly a decade without a revision control system? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control
      - solutionyogi 17y ago
        In Linus' git talk, he says that he finds creating different tarballs is much better version control than using CVS.
        ankhmoop 17y ago
        If you compare granularity of tracking and utility of historical version control across different projects of that era, such as FreeBSD vs. Linux, I think you'll find that Linus' position is clearly false.
  - rams 17y ago
    What's innovative about WebDAV ? It's basically a design by committee standard pushed by Rational to web enable clearcase; it's a very verbose protocol and there was an entry in Sussman's blog about replacing WebDAV with a better wire protocol like Mercurial's. Getting WebDAV into SVN was basically Greg Stein's idea - he had worked at Microsoft and had observed them transitioning over to WebDAV in a big way and started pushing for its usage in SVN as well - a move that was not well thought out. WebDAV is not very popular even with some of the SVN hackers. Berkeley DB was certainly old when it was adopted by the SVN project. It's not like the NFS issues with BDB were unknown.
    - gchpaco 17y ago
      I never said WebDAV was innovative, just that it was brand new and full of problems. And as for BDB, IIRC they were having issues with the database getting wedged constantly even when not using NFS. But this was long after I had stopped paying a great deal of attention to the project.
    - rbanffy 17y ago
      "he had worked at Microsoft and had observed them transitioning over to WebDAV in a big way and started pushing for its usage in SVN as well" That's why I am suspicious anyone who ever worked for Microsoft, specially when you talk about open-source. You never know when they will send a saboteur.
- durin42 17y ago
  You say that "Subversion was not that great of an idea" but if you go back to 2001 (which is when svn became selfhosting), or even 2004, CVS was such a disaster for some use cases that the need for a replacement was readily evident. Add to that the fact that svn was a compelling replacement for Visual Source Safe, and it was definitely a worthwhile idea. Sure, it's now the "old safe standard" of version control, but there's a lot of value in that for many companies. Several of the original svn team (including these two) have admitted that some of the design decisions (the handling of tags and branches most notably) were probably mistakes, given the value of hindsight. They got a lot right too, though. The delta editor interface is nicely abstracted to the point that hgsubversion uses the same delta editor as the svn command line client to do something the original design spec never would have anticipated. Yet it works extremely well. Subversion is much simpler for people to "get" than other systems. I've been a heavy evangelist of DVCS tools and workflows for a while at work, and it's taken since October (8 months) to get any critical mass behind actually even investigating switching to those from SVN. Let's face it: Subversion is many many times better than nothing, which is what a ton of people do. Most college graduates in CS or CSE come out of school never having touched version control in my experience, and the ones that have seen it were exposed via open source, not their coursework. Evangelizing Subversion is (really lousy analogy warning!) like convincing people to smoke cigarettes instead of doing illegal drugs. At least it's less bad for them, and the barrier to entry might be a bit lower. When we had a poll of the local Python users group one meeting, "email" was the most popular version control solution, followed by a basic dead heat between svn/bzr/git/hg. The fact that people still view email as a valid answer is far more troubling to me than evangelizing an old and very mature tool instead of one of the new upstarts.
  - jrockway 17y ago
    I think SVN is a classic case of overreacting. "CVS is bad, and it has first class branches and tags. Those must be bad too!" The result was a very poor design ("everything is a file!") and a very poor implementation. The implementation can be fixed (and it is going in that direction), but the design is broken to the point of being unusable. I am glad that CVS died, but it was "replaced" with something not-much-better.
gchpaco 17y ago
Genius exists, but is not a sufficiently good excuse for being an asshole.
- ram1024 17y ago
  truly, if you can't work with people then you can't accomplish great things. the days when one could single-handedly crank out something revolutionary are gone. maybe 3% of programmers can still do this, and 2 of those percent understand how much easier it is to lean on a dev team and learn co-operation. that just leaves the bitchy 1% we see taking offense at this informative presentation by their betters...
- rjurney 17y ago
  Bravo. Its amazing that so many people took something other than this away from their talk. Really drives the talk's point home, doesn't it?
dreish 17y ago
You seem to be making the same effort to miss the point as the man that ran through a litany of objections starting at 45:18. I don't like the "there are no geniuses" phrase, especially since they then have to back down and say, "Well, it isn't that there are no geniuses -- just that they're extremely rare," which just obscures the point further. The point I think they're trying to make, though, is that the myth of the hero programmer who writes a perfect program and releases it to a world full of unhelpful clods is counterproductive. If you want to dispute their point, then answer their question: What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?
- quellhorst 17y ago
  Git and Linux started out as creations of Linus.
  - rjurney 17y ago
    And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick, and he published his code very early so that collaborators could hack on it. Those two things were important in Linux and Git's success. Thats all the talk is about. And the only reason anyone is arguing with it is the very insecurity the talk seeks to address.
    - frisco 17y ago
      > And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? I'd argue that his Real Programmer protective stance towards Linux was more helpful to it taking off than being a really Nice Guy.
      - stcredzero 17y ago
        >> And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick > Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? "Not a total dick" in Internet terms is something like "A little to the left of Mao." However, Linus is also very astute and capable. People will tolerate "does not suffer fools gladly" if they are not a fool, or if they like the person's work. Every programmer with an ego should ask themselves, "Am I an unjustified asshole?" Consider: - Do a lot of people mostly like your work? - Does the cost/benefit of alienating people vs. shutting down the fools generally work out positively? (For the community not just for your personal gratification.) - Do people complain about you profusely, but for some reason still grudgingly respect you? Answer yes 3 times? Congrats: you are not an unjustified asshole! Are you a delusional asshole? - Do only a select few understand your work, and do you think even they are all inferiors? - Are you *always* right? - Do the people who are trying to do something valuable generally try to ignore you? Answer yes 3 times? Well, don't worry about it, you're probably one of the few who are genuinely ahead of their time and misunderstood. ;-)

by alavrik 17y ago

jrockway 17y ago

These guys look like being advocates of mediocrity. Yup. They wrote Subversion and continue to encourage people to use it. Perhaps they should tone down their egos and realize that Subversion was not really that great of an idea, and there are now several competing tools that do everything Subversion does, but better.

gchpaco 17y ago
A lot of the problems SVN ran into was trying to use cutting edge technology and standards before they were really ripe. WebDAV, for example, or the endless, endless iterations of Berkeley DB corruption. It is, in a lot of ways, an excellent illustration of the dangers of trying to solve the wrong problem.
- rimantas 17y ago
  Linus was making fun of SVN in his talk ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 ). One of his point was, that SVN chose the wrong way right from the start and there is no way to have "CVS done right" because CVS is hopeless by design.
  - absconditus 17y ago
    CVS may have had serious flaws, but I find Linus' original revision control practices to be less than optimal: "The Linux kernel source code used to be maintained without the help of an automated source code management system, mostly because of Linus Torvalds' dislike of centralized SCM systems. In 2002, Linux kernel development switched to BitKeeper, a SCM system which satisfied Linus Torvalds' technical requirements." Nearly a decade without a revision control system? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel#Revision_control
    - solutionyogi 17y ago
      In Linus' git talk, he says that he finds creating different tarballs is much better version control than using CVS.
      - ankhmoop 17y ago
        If you compare granularity of tracking and utility of historical version control across different projects of that era, such as FreeBSD vs. Linux, I think you'll find that Linus' position is clearly false.
- rams 17y ago
  What's innovative about WebDAV ? It's basically a design by committee standard pushed by Rational to web enable clearcase; it's a very verbose protocol and there was an entry in Sussman's blog about replacing WebDAV with a better wire protocol like Mercurial's. Getting WebDAV into SVN was basically Greg Stein's idea - he had worked at Microsoft and had observed them transitioning over to WebDAV in a big way and started pushing for its usage in SVN as well - a move that was not well thought out. WebDAV is not very popular even with some of the SVN hackers. Berkeley DB was certainly old when it was adopted by the SVN project. It's not like the NFS issues with BDB were unknown.
  - gchpaco 17y ago
    I never said WebDAV was innovative, just that it was brand new and full of problems. And as for BDB, IIRC they were having issues with the database getting wedged constantly even when not using NFS. But this was long after I had stopped paying a great deal of attention to the project.
  - rbanffy 17y ago
    "he had worked at Microsoft and had observed them transitioning over to WebDAV in a big way and started pushing for its usage in SVN as well" That's why I am suspicious anyone who ever worked for Microsoft, specially when you talk about open-source. You never know when they will send a saboteur.
durin42 17y ago
You say that "Subversion was not that great of an idea" but if you go back to 2001 (which is when svn became selfhosting), or even 2004, CVS was such a disaster for some use cases that the need for a replacement was readily evident. Add to that the fact that svn was a compelling replacement for Visual Source Safe, and it was definitely a worthwhile idea. Sure, it's now the "old safe standard" of version control, but there's a lot of value in that for many companies. Several of the original svn team (including these two) have admitted that some of the design decisions (the handling of tags and branches most notably) were probably mistakes, given the value of hindsight. They got a lot right too, though. The delta editor interface is nicely abstracted to the point that hgsubversion uses the same delta editor as the svn command line client to do something the original design spec never would have anticipated. Yet it works extremely well. Subversion is much simpler for people to "get" than other systems. I've been a heavy evangelist of DVCS tools and workflows for a while at work, and it's taken since October (8 months) to get any critical mass behind actually even investigating switching to those from SVN. Let's face it: Subversion is many many times better than nothing, which is what a ton of people do. Most college graduates in CS or CSE come out of school never having touched version control in my experience, and the ones that have seen it were exposed via open source, not their coursework. Evangelizing Subversion is (really lousy analogy warning!) like convincing people to smoke cigarettes instead of doing illegal drugs. At least it's less bad for them, and the barrier to entry might be a bit lower. When we had a poll of the local Python users group one meeting, "email" was the most popular version control solution, followed by a basic dead heat between svn/bzr/git/hg. The fact that people still view email as a valid answer is far more troubling to me than evangelizing an old and very mature tool instead of one of the new upstarts.
- jrockway 17y ago
  I think SVN is a classic case of overreacting. "CVS is bad, and it has first class branches and tags. Those must be bad too!" The result was a very poor design ("everything is a file!") and a very poor implementation. The implementation can be fixed (and it is going in that direction), but the design is broken to the point of being unusable. I am glad that CVS died, but it was "replaced" with something not-much-better.

gchpaco 17y ago

Genius exists, but is not a sufficiently good excuse for being an asshole.

ram1024 17y ago
truly, if you can't work with people then you can't accomplish great things. the days when one could single-handedly crank out something revolutionary are gone. maybe 3% of programmers can still do this, and 2 of those percent understand how much easier it is to lean on a dev team and learn co-operation. that just leaves the bitchy 1% we see taking offense at this informative presentation by their betters...
rjurney 17y ago
Bravo. Its amazing that so many people took something other than this away from their talk. Really drives the talk's point home, doesn't it?

dreish 17y ago

You seem to be making the same effort to miss the point as the man that ran through a litany of objections starting at 45:18. I don't like the "there are no geniuses" phrase, especially since they then have to back down and say, "Well, it isn't that there are no geniuses -- just that they're extremely rare," which just obscures the point further. The point I think they're trying to make, though, is that the myth of the hero programmer who writes a perfect program and releases it to a world full of unhelpful clods is counterproductive. If you want to dispute their point, then answer their question: What successful, widely-used project was created entirely by one lone genius?

quellhorst 17y ago
Git and Linux started out as creations of Linus.
- rjurney 17y ago
  And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick, and he published his code very early so that collaborators could hack on it. Those two things were important in Linux and Git's success. Thats all the talk is about. And the only reason anyone is arguing with it is the very insecurity the talk seeks to address.
  - frisco 17y ago
    > And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? I'd argue that his Real Programmer protective stance towards Linux was more helpful to it taking off than being a really Nice Guy.
    - stcredzero 17y ago
      >> And they only took off because Linus is not a total dick > Have you ever seen Linus on usenet? "Not a total dick" in Internet terms is something like "A little to the left of Mao." However, Linus is also very astute and capable. People will tolerate "does not suffer fools gladly" if they are not a fool, or if they like the person's work. Every programmer with an ego should ask themselves, "Am I an unjustified asshole?" Consider: - Do a lot of people mostly like your work? - Does the cost/benefit of alienating people vs. shutting down the fools generally work out positively? (For the community not just for your personal gratification.) - Do people complain about you profusely, but for some reason still grudgingly respect you? Answer yes 3 times? Congrats: you are not an unjustified asshole! Are you a delusional asshole? - Do only a select few understand your work, and do you think even they are all inferiors? - Are you *always* right? - Do the people who are trying to do something valuable generally try to ignore you? Answer yes 3 times? Well, don't worry about it, you're probably one of the few who are genuinely ahead of their time and misunderstood. ;-)