luckydude

9 ms·

31.
by luckydude 6y ago
BTW, Linus switched to Git 2005. BitKeeper didn't give up and turn to open source until 2016. So we had a 10 year run after Git showed up where people still paid us. It was good run, not many software companies get an 18 year run. I
32.
by luckydude 6y ago
The SCCS weave was our secret sauce. Tichy did the world a huge disservice in his PhD about RCS (like that was worth a PhD, come on) where he bad mouthed SCCS's weave (without understanding it, or maybe he was spreading misinformation
33.
by luckydude 6y ago
Well the compiler is open source, have at it :-) Personally, I would love a gcc --little dialect complete with a String type (and others) that is garbage collected and auto resized just like tcl/Little. With all the other Little goo
34.
by luckydude 6y ago
Actually I was part of an SCM conference put together by Facebook and Google recently. People are starting to think about what happens after Git. Unfortunately, even now, it seems that there is a lot catching up to BK still to be done. To
35.
by luckydude 6y ago
http://bitkeeper.org Been open source for years
36.
by luckydude 6y ago
There is no null, only undef. It's not a value, there is no value that means undef. We implemented by stealing the high order bit from the reference counter that tcl uses for garbage collection. If it is set, the variable undefined,
37.
by luckydude 6y ago
Hind sight is 20-20. The BitKeeper business had a good run, we were around for 18 years. It made enough that I and my business guy are retired off of what we made. On the other hand, we didn't make enough for everyone to retire if th
38.
by luckydude 6y ago
I just liked what is in Little, it's enough like C that it is trivial for me to jump into it (tcl always took a half a day, I really dislike the tcl syntax), it's got enough of the shortcuts from perl that it is pretty terse, and
39.
by luckydude 6y ago
You get undef, that's part of the reason we added an undef concept (it's a value that isn't a value, though if you treat it like an int I believe it is zero, like a string and you get "").
40.
by luckydude 6y ago
There are some benchmarks here: http://mcvoy.com/lm/L/tcl/tests/langbench/ some results in the README. Perl holds up well. These are probably 10 years old though.
41.
by luckydude 6y ago
I'm a huge fan of preserving knowledge and building on it. Most people, at the time at least, knew what while (buf = <>) did. So I didn't want to invent a new syntax, there is way too much of that going on, I like C, I lik
42.
by luckydude 6y ago
I'll grant you it is sort of weird. I think that's a perl thing, we just copied how they did it. undef is both a function and a (non) value. It is the main reason Little never got pushed back into tcl, the tcl crowd hates the id
43.
by luckydude 6y ago
Wow, just noticed this. I'm the guy who paid for Little, a bunch of other people did all the work. I'm surprised to see it getting some attention but happily so. Little is what I'd like C to evolve towards, there is a lot o
44.
by luckydude 8y ago
I'm sort of sick of this environment. HN used to be cool, for me, not so much lately. If you are having a good time, go you, I really wish HN the best, it's one of the better places on the internet, but I'm very close to ju
45.
by luckydude 8y ago
Couldn't agree more though I got downvoted for saying more or less the same thing earlier today (still don't understand that but, um, internet).
46.
by luckydude 8y ago
One of the few languages that I've seen in years that I liked right away. Checks a lot of my boxes, I like the inferred types and I like static typing. Nice job!
47.
by luckydude 8y ago
I've been arguing with a friend of mine at Facebook about this. He's unrepentant, thinks it's just advertising and it is fine. I disagree, it's an advertising machine that is constantly looking over your shoulder and i
48.
by luckydude 8y ago
I think network effect and the fact that the linux kernel was in git. When the kernel was using BitKeeper that was huge for us, people went "welp, if it's good enough for the kernel it's good enough for us". And I think
49.
by luckydude 8y ago
I agree with cookiecaper. We went hard (for us) into marketing before giving up and what we learned by going to dev conferences is that people think GitHub is source management. If you talk about any sort of workflow other than what githu
50.
by luckydude 8y ago
How long does that take? In BK it's as fast as you can click. If git is like that what tools are you using to do that?
51.
by luckydude 8y ago
Yeah, you are so right. We sucked at that.
52.
by luckydude 8y ago
Dude, troll much? I'm retired, and you are messing with me? I engage because I want to help. BitKeeper is mostly dead, I've offered to go to facebook and transfer as much as I can to their SCM.
53.
by luckydude 8y ago
Heh, no worries dude (or dudette), I have dealt with the trolls. You can't post that the sky is blue without getting the trolls telling you are doing it wrong. Every day humans make me again realize that I love my dogs, and respect my
54.
by luckydude 8y ago
So BK is kinda weird in that the metadata that binds all the files together in a commit is just another version controlled file. We built a GUI tool that lets you look at a versioned file, it shows you the graph in the top pane and either d
55.
by luckydude 8y ago
If you want correctness then you lock the repo when you are updating it. We do that and make it work on NFS, which is not that easy to do. If you want to live in a world where two people can be wacking the repo at the same time with undefi
56.
by luckydude 8y ago
I think it's interesting, it's checks off a lot of my boxes. We wanted to do a product that we called "software dev in a box" that was SCM, bug db, wiki, etc. Fossil comes closer to this than we did. So that part is r
57.
by luckydude 8y ago
You can go look at BK's merge alg, it's quite cool. And the basic implementation was done in about 20 minutes. And it is extremely fast. I should write up a blog post about it, it's pretty complicated to understand because
58.
by luckydude 8y ago
So I'd like you to prove that git won't lose work. Even smart people who use git have typed stuff that made them lose work. You can, and will, argue they are morons. That's an excellent way to deal with a poorly designed sy
59.
by luckydude 8y ago
You're talking to the guy that created that concept [1]. I get that changesets are cool :) You're right, you do want to see all that info together. But lots of times you want to look at the file view, find the line of code that
60.
by luckydude 8y ago
Linus, in my kitchen, surrounded by impressed women who were asking how he lost weight. He had just answered the question "did you give up drinking" with a "hell, no!" http://www.mcvoy.com/lm/photo

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