Linus Torvalds: Making

Linus Torvalds is Finnish-American software engineer and hacker. Explore interesting quotes on making.
Linus Torvalds: 300 quotes28 likes

“Personally, I'm not interested in making device drivers look like user-level. They aren't, they shouldn't be, and microkernels are just stupid.”

Linus Torvalds

Post, mlist.linux.kernel newsgroup, 2002-05-25, Google Groups, Torvalds, Linus, 2006-08-28 http://groups.google.com/group/mlist.linux.kernel/msg/938ffa86ae60dc7a, <br class="br">2000s, 2000-04

“Hey, that's not a bug, that's a feature! You know what the most complex piece of engineering known to man in the whole solar system is? Guess what – it's not Linux, it's not Solaris, and it's not your car. It's you. And me. And think about how you and me actually came about – not through any complex design. Right. "Sheer luck". Well, sheer luck, and:
• Free availability and crosspollination through sharing of "source code", although biologists call it DNA.
• A rather unforgiving user environment, that happily replaces bad versions of us with better working versions and thus culls the herd (biologists often call this "survival of the fittest").
• Massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error").
I'm deadly serious: we humans have never been able to replicate something more complicated than what we ourselves are, yet natural selection did it without even thinking. Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest. And don't ever make the mistake that you can design something better than what you get from ruthless massively parallel trial-and-error with a feedback cycle. That's giving your intelligence much too much credit. Quite frankly, Sun is doomed. And it has nothing to do with their engineering practices or their coding style.”

Linus Torvalds

2000s, 2000-04

“First we had two earthquakes - fine, this week God not only hates republicans, but apparently us kernel developers too. But we kernel developers laugh in the face of danger, and a 5.5 earthquake just makes us whimper and hide in the closet for a while.”

Linus Torvalds

2010s, 2012