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)
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.
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
Don’t forget:
- he was rich
Don’t forget:
- his dad was rich
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…
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.
