In a cave with a box of scrap
The biggest tragedy of modern media is that they chose to cast Elon Musk as the real life Tony Stark instead of torvalds who created 2 pieces of truly revolutionary software (with the help of thousands of other engineers ofc)
Four things went for Musk:
- he was rich
- he had a passing resemblance to Robert Downey Jr.
- he
madewas closely associated with futuristic hardware (we don’t seem to value revolutionary software the same way as hardware) - he was rich
In all honesty, a lot of solo developers who are directly responsible for the internet as we know it should be getting far more credit than rich ass holes but here we are.
Edit: correct
Also Subsurface, a scuba diving log program, but that one is not quite as well known.
Made me curious if Torvalds at least got some reward for his work besides gratitude from people who use his stuff. I’m not sure how credible internet estimates of net worth are but looking up “Linus Torvalds net worth” keeps showing me stuff from $50–$150 million so hey, at least he’s (probably) comfortable. Not exactly Tony Stark superhero territory but if he wasn’t rich enough to sit at home and sleep for the rest of his life if he wanted to I’d probably be upset on his behalf for a bit, before I moved onto the next outrage of the day. Glad to see he’s well-off.
Turned out better than javascript.
Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! 😱
Interesting footnote: the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn’t yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest “what if” moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there’s a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I’m not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened.
Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there’s pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows…
Tool Command Language. It’s a shitty stringly-typed scripting language from the 80s that took a neat hack (function bodies are string literals) way too far.
It’s a bit less shit than Bash, but shitter than Perl.
Unfortunately the entire EDA industry has decided to use it as their scripting interface, which isn’t too bad in itself - the commands they provide are pretty simple - but unfortunately it leads to people stupidly basing their entire EDA infrastructure on TCL rather than wrapping it in a saner language.
I believe his goto comment on git is that its current maintainer did/does far more work on git them him.
Thank god for that dude.
Handing over maintainership was not a hard choice. It was very much: “The moment somebody else comes along that I can trust to keep it going, I’ll go back to doing just the kernel.”
Priorities
Compare that with someone who wants the appearance of creating/maintaining something, without actually contributing musk of anything…
it’s wild just doing git init instead of manually setting up /truck, /tags, and /branch every time.
It could’ve been mercurial, but I’m glad that didn’t happen. Being shouted at in a mailing-list for fixing a bug doesn’t sound like fun. Also, the amount of CPU resources that would be wasted running a VCS in python would be phenomenal. And have fun trying to develop a project using a separate python version than supported by your python VCS.
If Mercurial were as popular as Git I would presume that it would be rewritten in C or Rust, but who can say.
Care to explain your comment for a layman?
From my limited experience mercurial is way more intuitive than git. The big one is named branches are a thing instead of an abstraction.
Git branches are very different to Mercurial branches. In git they’re similar to tags that move along with the head commit of that particular branch. In Mercurial every commit contains meta data indicating the branch it’s on. It also has a query language that lets you do sone quite neat things with selecting groups of commits based on their metadata, which can be useful in code reviews and similar.
No, git has labels on heads of branches. Once the head moves you loose the information. It also makes for a more messy history, which I believe created the whole “rebase everything” philosophy to cope.
Python 10s of multiples more CPU cycles than git. It is an interpreted language: every instruction is read by another process, checked, and then run. Hit on the other hand is executed straight by the CPU. It has at least one layer of indirection less than python (the python interpreter may have multiple). That means it can be slower but it definitely uses more energy.
Since git is so popular, if it were instead mercurial, the energy requirements would be much higher for version control. Whether that will be noticeable on a bill is debatable. I haven’t run the numbers.
Regarding the different python versions. As mentioned before, there is a python interpreter. That interpreter is versioned and so is the python language. Many things are backwards compatible meaning something written in a higher version of the python language can be interpreted by a lower version of the python interpreter. The reverse is also true, so python interpreter with a higher version can interpret a python file using a lower version of the language.
Notice that I put “can” in bold. That’s because newer versions can deprecate certain features or parts of the language. So, if you’re writing a project in a different version of python, mercurial may or may not run depending on your version. Resolving that may not be as intuitive as one thinks.
I think those were he points you were referring to when you asked your question?
I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say a significant percentage of Git activity happens on GitHub (and other “foundries”) – which are themselves a far cry from efficient.
My ultimate takeaway on the topic is that we’re stuck with Git’s very counterintuitive porcelain, and only satisfactory plumbing, regardless of performance/efficiency; but if Mercurial had won out, we’d still have its better interface (and IMO workflow), and any performance problems could’ve been addressed by a rewrite in C (or the Rust one that is so very slowly happening).
Surely it could be rewritten in Fortran if performance is really a concern.
Being shouted at in a mailing-list for fixing a bug doesn’t sound like fun.
What’s that a reference to?
Some instances of one of the mercurial devs being a bully. It was a long time ago and I can’t remember the alias of the dev, but I do remember they had merge or commit rights - whatever those are called in mercurial. It felt like they had their own Linus but different. Whether they are still active or whether they still are like that, I dunno. Certainly hope they changed.
Dunno if the git mailing list was as toxic. Didn’t investigate that.
