Re: Coding style - a non-issue

John Alvord
2001-12-02T09:32:20Z

On Sat, 1 Dec 2001 21:39:16 +0100 (CET), Stanislav Meduna
<stano@meduna.org> wrote:

>Hello,
>
>wow, what a nice discussion. I am reading the l-k through an
>archive, so please forgive me if I am going to say something
>that was already said, but I did not yet read it.
>
>
>Linus wrote:
>> Don't underestimate the power of survival of the fittest.
>
>Well, your theory is really an interesting view on the
>software development. However, I think that there are
>some points that need some more discussion.
>
>First, you are probably right in the long-term. The nature
>did have enough time for excursions in one or another
>direction - the "project" of life is several orders of magnitude
>older than a single generation. You say that it is possible
>to help the evolution. But you still need many generations
>to be sure that a good result at some stage is not only some
>statistical variance.
To make the process interesting long term, you need the periodic mass
extinction to open up ecologic windows for new development. Absent
that you would wind up stuck in some local optimum.
>
>The technology does not IMHO work that way - Linux (Unix
>in all its flavours, Windows, ...) is very young.
>We are not in the stage where life exists for millions
>of years. We are in the stage where the first cells
>have formed and are still quite vulnerable. There is only
>a thin line between survival as a kind and extinction (sp?).
>I think that in this stage not ignoring the role of
>the design is a good thing (and no, I don't believe in God :-)).
>
>Besides that, are you talking about evolution in general,
>or about evolution of a particular kind? The competition
>is not the same in these cases.
>
>> - massive undirected parallel development ("trial and error")
>
>This is not what is happening here.
The current Linux environment is much like the accelerated change
observed in directed breeding... say with breeding dogs or horses...
with an "intelligence" pushing toward desired characteristics (instead
of blind nature) progress is very rapid.

john alvord