Re: Coding style - a non-issue

Petko Manolov
2001-12-01T01:17:09Z

:-)) This made my day.. May be my week. :-))

100% agree (better not play gods) and i think this is the end of
the discussion.

Petko

Linus Torvalds wrote:

> On Fri, 30 Nov 2001, Rik van Riel wrote:
>
>>I'm very interested too, though I'll have to agree with Larry
>>that Linux really isn't going anywhere in particular and seems
>>to be making progress through sheer luck.
>>
>
> 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