449
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 ~~made~~ was 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
Don’t forget:
- he was rich
Don’t forget:
- his dad was rich
I mean, let’s be thorough. He’s
- the rich scion
- of a family that made their fortune owning and exploiting emerald mines
- in South Africa
- during apartheid
Kinda tells you all you need to know about him and his family.
Also his dad fucked and ~~married~~ (edit: correction (side note: fuck me, somehow it was WAY weirder than I had remembered):) fathered not one, but TWO children with his own stepdaughter. No, I’m not kidding.
Edit 2: nope, they married in the 90s too! You can’t make this shit up.
Wait what‽
A distinction without a difference
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...
Thanks, I hate it even more
The TV company?
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 expected someone to say that, and boom first comment lol
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.
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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.
What do you mean by "are a thing?" Git has branches.
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.
That just sounds like an implementation detail.
Can you provide an example of something that's possible in Mercurial, but not git?
I've never used Mercurial, but a simple one based on the explanations and my experience with Git:
Locating the branch a commit originated from. If a git branch has been merged into (or rebased on) main or another branch, there's no way to tell which commit came from which branch. But sometimes I'd really like that information to figure out what prompted a certain change. Without it, I need to use external tools like a ticketing system and hope the other developers added in the necessary information.
That seems to be the opposite of useful if a commit is initially pushed to a development branch, which is relatively standard practice; now you're polluting the tree with data that's purposefully ephemeral, and even potentially leaking internal information.
Also, I'd argue that such deep details do belong in another tool, rather than asking the source control tool perform triple duty by being a CR and issue tracker as well.
Most of the time you're right, it's little more than a detail, but sometimes I miss the querying that it allowed. You could ask for things like a list of all branches that branched from a specific parent branch and modified a specific file, Which can be handy when you want to understand the impact a change might have before you make it and try merging.
Having the branch name embedded in the commit means you can meaningfully ask this sort of question. In git's model you can't say a changeset is in a specific branch once there are child branches further downstream because the changeset is in all of those branches.
Rather than come up with lots of examples for other queries (I know it wasn't the focus of your question, but I think it's really neat), I found this page which seems like a reasonable description.
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.
What information is "loosed" when another commit is made to the branch?
If I hand you a commit, you cannot tell which ‘branch’ it is on without searching the git history and hoping that you only get one answer. That’s a bummer if, for instance, you’re a github action and only get handed the commit. If it’s on the master branch, I want to do different things than if it’s a dev branch.
A commit all by itself doesn't mean as much without context.
Why would I not want to be able to apply a commit to any arbitrary branch?
Also, GitHub is not git - it's based on git. Any shortcomings it may have aren't necessarily due to a flaw in git.
A commit all by itself doesn’t mean as much without context.
Luckily a commit points to its parent, which means the context is inherently present. What’s your point?
Why would I not want to be able to apply a commit to any arbitrary branch?
Nobody said that.
Any shortcomings it may have aren’t necessarily due to a flaw in git.
True enough.
Your claim appears to be that Mercurial binds commits to branches, and I'm explaining how I fail to see the advantage.
It makes the history clearer.
Mercurial is written in Python, Git in C.
Given the number of git instances, had it been implemented in Python, more CPU cycles / electricity would have been used.
Blah blah Mercurial is responsible for global warming. (I’m being sarcastic by the way - I love Mercurial).
I think it's less user experience and more that mercurial is a lot more demanding hardware wise to do the same rough job?
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?
Surely it could be rewritten in Fortran if performance is really a concern.
Assembly is the true language of the gods, sir.
Apart from the obvious lack of portability, compilers write better assembly than most humans.
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).
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I'm part of the accounting team in my company, a fucking big corporation, but because I'm not part of the dev or IT department IT dosen't want to give me access to the azure devops they use. So I had to ask for service desk to install git locally and using it like that.
Principle of least permission. I'm a dev and I still have to ask for temporary permission to even access customer infrastructure to solve production issues. Why should you need access to deployment infrastructure? I would deny you too, especially if your need could be solved by a local install of git.
I think we in the financial department need a devops for us, we write a lot of code that generates a lot of important information for strategic decisions and for regulatory bodies. I'm the only one in the accounting team that knows how to code, but the actuarial team? All of them write code. And all of that code is sparced on butch of directories with _v{n}, _final_version, _post-fix, (copy) and so on. Is completely ridiculous that everything is being moved to Python without a git environment.
I'm a SysAdmin and I've met several 'coders' who went thru a coding bootcamp, or even went to college and don't know about git, less alone how to use it... kinda makes me sad.
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this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2025
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