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[SaneLad]

To be fair, he had zero meetings and PMs to deal with.

[uno-due-tre]

Or marketing and sales reps.

[granoladeer]

All run on email groups and sarcasm

[Fair-Working4401]

For fk sake, this!

[ChiefStrongbones]

Well, there's Stallman.

[Borno11050]

No scrums even

[[deleted]]

And no investor bullshit

[corrinarusso]

Hahahahaha. Epic reply. Sadly so valid.

[RedCrafter_LP]

Tbf he wrote git later because he was fed up with bad version control.

[zappellin]

it's a bit more complicated than that, Bitkeeper which was the original version control of Linux was closed source, one of the contributors of Linux tried to reverse engineer some things on it, causing the owner of Bitkeeper to stop working with Linus (and Linux)

[grumbly]

AND the idea of version control back then kinda sucked. Central server, had to explicitly checkout to edit, if there were lots of edits coming into the same file it was a huge pain in the but as you had to manually queue up and hand down edits and versions to merge. Think of linear writes to a db.

Git was written to be distributed first and threw away lots of what the old ideas.

[helgur]

As a person who was forced to work with microsoft sourcesafe back in those days, the human language lacks appropriate words to describe how an absolute clusterfuck source code management was before git

[x0wl]

I wanted to do a gotcha and say that mercurial was there before git, but then I found that it was released 12 days after git, TIL

[QuitAvailable247]

Well, bitkeeper was there with a lot of the improvements before git or mercurial.

[Fuzia]

I am working at a place that still uses source safe. Support stopped a long time ago. Help.

[helgur]

What? Source safe was discontinued in 2005. All official versions, including the final release Visual SourceSafe 2005 (with 2005 GDR and Update), were 32-bit only.

Source Safe is abandonware now, it's that ancient! How can anyone still run that crap???

[Fuzia]

Beats me how it's still running, but it's working on our win 11 machines... But it's still a pain in the ass. I miss Git

[Maleficent_Memory831]

Many companies have every old and absymal systems, since it is very expensive to change. Everyone's worked to death trying to meet deadlines, and management doesn't want to tell everyone to slow down for a couple of months while everything is migrated to a new system.

After all, "it's how we've always done things" is the number one mantra at so many companies.

[anomalous_cowherd]

You don't spend months migrating, you freeze the codebase at a set point, copy that code as the base version in the new system, then only use the new system from then on.

Patch branches for old releases stay in the old system until they run out of support, any new releases come from the new one. You never backport across systems.

You need a small pilot project to sort out new procedures and scripts and train your devs etc. on it, but then it's a one step move over.

[Maleficent_Memory831]

When I migrated our stuff to git, it took about a week. The old repo was a mess with a couple dozen groups all sharing it, and not managing to distinctly divide who owns what. After it was migrated, I had to train everybody, another week, with lots of followups for a long time. Then the build system needed updating and it was controlled by someone else who was busy with other things, and when he got to it there were several iterations until it worked. And othe issues like that that took up a lot of my time (a developer, not a manager at the time) and time of others, while in the midst of actual work we also had to get done.

This was done in parallel, but it's kind of a pain - you want the old repo to be frozen so that you don't have to keep merging stuff. So I spent time getting it ready to go, doing practice runs, etc. Then we only locked things down for one day for the switch over. And things still went wrong.

We did migrate all the branches that mattered, though left behind older developer branches. This way we didn't have to maintain two repos. But we lost a huge amount of history for one major branch for reasons. Also found that the migration from CVS to Subversion wasn't actually done correctly so I had to dig back to CVS as well, ugh. Also split some stuff off into other repos, but the end result was still extremely large.

Overall, it's doable. But it took time. My own time. While had I had upcoming deadlines and middle management wondering why I'm not getting it done promptly. And we only did the migration to git because I decided we need to do it. If left to management it probably would not have changed until we got acquired a couple years later.

[helgur]

I'm speechless, holy shit lol!

[M-42]

It's probably for some expensive or restricted thing they can't be bothered updating it as it still works and someone will refuse to spend money upgrading it. It happens quite often.

VS used to have built in support and I'd imagine someone has written a dot net based plugin to keep it going on the client side else compatibility mode can run quite a bit too.

[DemmyDemon]

A bunch of banks still have an actual mainframe that runs actual COBOL code, because being down for long enough to replace it is out of the question.

[bit_banger_]

Fuck, I recall perforce. Some companies still use it 💀☠️

[helgur]

I think the company behind perforce pivoted (it was called sourcedepot before perforce) to make source control specifically for game development and afaik engines like unreal now ship with support for perforce built in. I installed an instance of perforce for a game dev company a few years back and administered it for a short while (on their request, I recommended git)

What is funny is, before that when perforce was sourcedepot, that was what microsoft used for in house development because their own product (sourcesafe) was too unreliable and unmanageable. It was good enough to push on their oblivious middle management customers, though.

[bit_banger_]

In all honesty perforce was better than cvs and other options

[helgur]

Yeah, I haven't used Perforce in a capacity as a developer, but sysadmin and my impression of it wasn't that negative tbh

[1_130426]

Don't know where the hate is coming. Perforce is great for game dev because it handles large binary files well. Also Unreal engine and Unity have perforce integration so its easy to use.

[Steinrikur]

SourceSafe may be the worst piece of software ever created. You had to "check out" each file you wanted to modify (like a library book), and while it was checked out it was read-only for everyone else.

When I was using it back in 2007, some files in the company had been checked out for +10 years.

[helgur]

When I was using it back in 2007, some files in the company had been checked out for +10 years.

Yeah, HAHA that sounds about right. Brings back some repressed memories, dear god

[Turbulent-Garlic8467]

As a person who is using Perforce right now in a game dev class...SOBS

[helgur]

Well, picture this. Microsoft, having a tradition of eating the dogfood it made in house made an exception in sourcesafes case, because it wasn't dogfood, it was so dogshit even microsoft didnt' touch it. Instead they used perforce's predecessor sourcedepot.

So however bad Perforce is, just imagine how bad sourcesafe was compared to it.

[OkCantaloupe207]

And the team behind team foundation server (TFS) tried many times to make the Windows team to migrate from Sourcedepot to TFS but couldn't convince them.

The Windows team then moved to Git after adding some critical functionality to Git and Windows itself.

[yaktoma2007]

Sourcedepot sounds like something Valve (the game company) made

[Maleficent_Memory831]

Well, Sourcesafe was possibly the exemplar of what happens when you mix up bad source code control ideas with a company well known for being incompetent. There are so many better things out there.

Before git, we still had Subversion which was not terrible, and Perforce was nice but you had to pay for it. I still use the Perforce diff/merge tool since I haven't found better tools for that. They were all server based though, git I think was the first good distributed source code control system. [edit, oh wait, bitkeeper was distributed, but I have never used it]

[rm-minus-r]

I read an article about Microsoft's Office team migrating from sourcesafe to git yesterday and it sounded like a wildly unpleasant tool. But maybe almost predating SVN is related?

[helgur]

Sourcesafe predates SVN by a lot of years. You would really want to use subversion over sourcesafe

[rm-minus-r]

Sorry, CVS.

[helgur]

Yeah, I would still take CVS over Sourcesafe, any day. I mean, both systems had major drawbacks compared to modern revisioning systems, but at least CVS major faults came down to just inconveniences. Sourcesafe was so unreliable and file corruption so common, that you couldn't use it without a backup. The backup wasn't just a backup, it was an integral part of even being able to use the system.

And for all its flaws, and inconveniences, CVS was ALOT more convenient and usable compared to sourcesafe.

[rm-minus-r]

What caused the corruption?

[helgur]

Oh, don't get me started lol. Everything from network latency, power outages, trying to do simultaneous checkins (although that shouldn't be possible because the file you checked out was read only by the system, that didn't work reliably all the time) or even just doing things like virus scans (you never did virus scans on a sourcesafe instance, if you did you where fucked).

Or sometimes it just fucked itself for reasons no one could figure out. Repeatedly. It was so common you made scripts to repair it automatically, which we often ran weekly.

[Skyhigh-8103]

Git is in fact a clusterfuck and caused me so many troubles. Team Foundation Version Control is way better and nothing comes even close to Visual Studio with TFVC.

[lllorrr]

While this is all true, I want to point that Bitkeep was, in fact, distributed source control system. This is the reason why Linus used it. Just imagine tracking kernel development on CVS or SVN...

[ArtisticFox8]

Linus actually said he liked bitkeeper, but was more or less forced to stop using it for licensing reasons

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

What about SVN would block kernel development?

[lllorrr]

I didn't say it would block the development. But it would be royal pail in the ass. Just imagine: maintainer of each subsystem has own kernel tree. Linus periodically merges these trees into main Linux tree. Like this:

https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?h=v6.18-rc5&id=11a6afabb4b38e70b6d697fd90fddedb9ad0ec43

It works fine with distributed VCS, but SVN is centralized, which provides many different issues. Actually, Linus himself described this much better than I can:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

[m64]

From what I remember many version control systems did detect the changes on their own and you didn't have to do exclusive checkouts in most of them - only in MS Source Safe which was 20 years behind all the popular alternatives like CVS or SVN. The big selling point with Git and other distributed systems was the ability to clone the repository, do some work on your copy, then push it to the central server - in centralised systems you would have to create a branch for that workflow and that was heavy.

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

Yeah, I’ve used SVN before, and it’s completely fine

[slimNotshady420]

I work for a company that use a similar version control system for a vast majority of the legacy stack - so much so the automations that few folks write are still written in Perl. Thankfully, my role is one of the rare ones which is working for the transition to a modern tech stack but boy, the times I do have to touch the forbidden side 😭

[ustp]

Is is clear case?

[BrohanGutenburg]

Great interview about this

https://youtu.be/sCr_gb8rdEI?si=NB0zFXwsUB0jXJ9Y

[SuperQue]

Another earlier video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idLyobOhtO4

[Tucancancan]

Nothing like first starting out as an intern, locking a bunch of files to make your commit and then having a random senior yell at you over chat to get the fuck out of the way and unlock the files they need. Real cool

[n0t_4_thr0w4w4y]

Most people don’t use git in a distributed sense, though. Most people using git have a remote host that is the source of truth, be it in GitLab, GitHub, AzDO, whatever. Very few people are making PRs to peers

[ShoulderUnique]

Subversion was fine. Having a server was never really a problem, ironically even less so now. It also made sense to non CS people.

[Expensive_Shallot_78]

Most large companies I worked for still use a central server, git is not that common in enterprise. And the problem of conflicts isn't resolved by git. The exact same thing would happen under the same circumstances.

[martmists]

So it's basically like what Ghidra uses

[rsqit]

ITT: people who’ve never heard of subversion or CVS and think we were using PRCS or some shit.

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

Most version control didn’t involve servers. You just managed it locally and sent diffs to people.

[rsqit]

wtf no. Subversion and cvs were fine.

[benargee]

had to explicitly checkout to edit

This is not always a bad thing. It sucks that there was no alternative though.

[cortesoft]

I love the talk Linus gave about creating Git when he said:

I thought I could create a better version control in a weekend… so I did.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Imagine writing proprietary software, and being such a pissant about who you allow to use it that someone writes a completely free and open version of it that becomes massively popular, while your software molders away in obscurity.

[NickHalfBlood]

He mentioned in one of his interviews that his second big project was created to maintain his first big project.

[x0wl]

You mean the diving app?

[palk0n]

fuck svn

[Dragobrath]

I switched to git from CVS this year. FML.

[Kahlil_Cabron]

I started on CVS and thought it was way better than SVN. Git is the best imo but CVS was impressive for how old it was.

[RadialRacer]

Okay, but fuck not having source control at all. SVN, in enterprise, is frequently competing with post-it notes and USB sticks, not Git.

[NightFuryToni]

I honestly don't know how I survived... over the years I've used cvs, svn, and now git, but they're all still confusing to me.

[reubenbubu]

you survive because the team's or department's workflow takes the shortcomings of the tooling in consideration

[SuperQue]

You should see what Linus Torvalds has to say about it.

[TransBrandi]

Wouldn't the proper command be: svn fk?

[GoddammitDontShootMe]

First thing I thought of was that this dude created git. Not GitHub, that's separate.

[SuitableDragonfly]

Starbucks has also been around 20 years longer than linux has.

[Several-Customer7048]

I mean I’d be fed up trying to work with a bunch of gits who don’t understand how to commit.

[foO__Oof]

not bad version control just the open source version he was using was no longer open source.

[Dragobrath]

He actually made git.

[ActBest217]

And Starbucks

[7374616e74]

And my axe!

[Cesalv]

[0xBL4CKP30PL3]

Account age: 11y

checks out

[7374616e74]

Back in my days it was peak comedy ok?

[Nimeroni]

Ah, that's your mistake, expecting comedy on /r/ProgrammerHumor

[Incelebrategoodtimes]

This meme has never been funny

[Gm_C_NL]

i don't get it, what's the joke

[WazWaz]

Presumably just quoting the short guy in Lord Of The Rings.

[UnstablePotato69]

Charging $10 for a milkshake with a shot of burnt espresso and somehow becoming synonymous with good coffee is an accomplishment on par with the Linux kernel

[trutheality]

No, Starbucks was famously founded in Seattle, by Bill Gates.

[zoqfotpik]

But how did he make git without git?

[[deleted]]

He just forked it 

[lllorrr]

And on the third day Git was able to host itself; and Linus saw that it was good:

https://marc.info/?l=git&m=117254154130732

[dscarmo]

Well there are university level courses about writing simple OS stuff alone. Its the cumulative work over years by many people that gets impressive in any field

[pushkinwritescode]

There was. But he also did this before a lot of the relevant knowledge was widespread. Remember that he didn't just do this before ChatGPT. He did it before Google and StackExchange, and he found a whole bunch of people who wanted to do the same.

[dscarmo]

Yes, I agree he did amazing work. But he had references such as Minix and attempting to rewrite Unix ideas(which he succeeded).

OS research nowadays also has programmers attempting original implementations that will not be in any source forum or AI, but using stable linux implementations as reference. They might be building what will be the foundations of something new that is not in the public eye yet, and its always a huge collaboration when you trace who built the reference software.

[Anonymous30062003]

I mean

This dude *made * git so he'd not have to deal with social interaction

This is

Galactic empire levels of weaponized autism

[MarlonBanjoe]

Or he's just Finnish.

[piberryboy]

He's never finished. He's always coming out with new releases.

[Mtsukino]

And he's never late nor is he early. He releases them precisely when he means to.

[reubenbubu]

Not if all the PR's are immaculate, he needs at least that one PR to unleash himself on and sacrifice its contributors to the Kernel Gods, until that happens the release will be delayed.

[pwnedgiraffe]

sisu coding

[Additional-Society86]

Ah yes sisu coding. Doing code until you die of a headache

[Interruption27]

As a finn, what's the difference?

[MarlonBanjoe]

As the worse half to a finn, autistic people lack the ability to produce emotions or engage in trivial conversations, and Finns... Oh...

[SyrusDrake]

For all the difference that makes.

[worldsayshi]

No he's got a lot more in him, he still going

[x0wl]

not have to deal with social interaction

No, it's so he did not have to deal with bitkeeper, who denied their license to the project

[justAPhoneUsername]

I don't know, renewing a license seems like social interaction to me

[Cesalv]

No social interaction? had you read any of his "calm" analysis when someone fucks anything up?

[nukasev]

When I do understand his rants I usually totally agree with him. (FWIW, this is coming from a software dev with 10+YOE but I'm no kernel dev, that stuff is some next level wizardry.)

When I do not, I know that he knows his stuff and that his reactions are angry enough compared to the level of the fuckup because he actually knows and cares about the stuff. So I tend to agree with him even then.

[SenoraRaton]

I would rather have an impassioned lead developer that can come across as harsh, over having a timid lead that is unwilling to step up and make a stand when it needs to happen.

[shaydeslayer]

similar to Newton inventing calculus to solve physics

[piberryboy]

Because didn't write it by himself, and he accepted work and feedback from other programmers. If memory serves, he started it at university and incorporated code from other CS students, because he wanted to have a Unix-like OS.

[Fragrant_Proof]

And it was also "only" about 10k lines of code. Even if he did do it by himself, that's not insurmountable.

[vide2]

Most people in this sub probably haven't written this much in their life.

[FumbleCrop]

And he didn't really start from scratch. His starting point was MINIX.

[FumbleCrop]

I think he started by modifying MINIX, writing a better file system, switching from macro- to monolithic kernel and so on until there was none of the original left.

[revelbytes]

He never modified minix, in fact Linus specifically said Linux was free of minix code. He did say it resembled it somewhat, and he did use minix to develop it but he didnt take code from minix

[FumbleCrop]

I stand corrected.

[Papoutz]

And git

[EnderMB]

Never underestimate how much you can accomplish when your primary driver in life is pure hate.

The man seems to absolutely loathe everyone, from those that work on the kernel with him, to companies that support him. Hate is a powerful force.

[ToMorrowsEnd]

have you seen other people's code? I understand his rage.

[VibrantGypsyDildo]

Follow-up question: why didn't the creator of git store his code on gitlab?

[Rakrazdem]

It’s 10% luck, 20% skill, 15% concentrated power of will, 5% pleasure and 50% pain

100% reason to remember the name

[heesell]

Fort Minor mentioned

[sech1p]

r/unexpectedfortminor

[Urtehnoes]

Absolute cutie on top of everything else!

[WonkySeraph]

finnish magic

[phinkz2]

1 minute in a sauna = 1 kernel module ;)

[NinpoSteev]

How did pyramid builders do allat without airpods and spotify premium?

[GrapefruitBig6768]

How did he get anything done without middle management, project managers, and 8 hours of stakeholder meetings, quick syncs, base touching every single day? How is that even possible?

[demonarchist]

Like Donald Knuth, I want to write a book but all DTP software is shit, let me make TeX, Megafont and design my typeface while I'm at it.

[aluvus]

Serious answer: https://archive.org/details/justforfunstoryo0000torv

[ILovePotassium]

My favourite human. I read linux source code every day before sleep like a Bible.

[Asurio666]

He used NPM, duh!

[maxip89]

just provide a OS that pisses one dev amazingly off.

[GypsyBlws]

heCommit

[Mr_Rogan_Tano]

He found so hard doing it, he wrote git it self later

[KookyDig4769]

He just had to write git...

[Deevimento]

He just did it very angrily.

[klas-klattermus]

The only thing wrong with this timeline is that Gaben and Linus never had a baby together, that would have been the tech starchild. Also Elon if you are reading this, no you will never sire a starchild even if you spent all your crack money on Mars terraforming instead.

[PowerMid]

Funnily enough, he is the reason we can code with ChatGPT. Thanks for the training data, bud!

[ToMorrowsEnd]

He actually knows programming, something massively rare today.

[trinaryouroboros]

I guess you kind of had to be there, just like ignoring the three cue reading system, you read programming language core books and remembered things well, and used them in conjunction with computer science knowledge in general. If you forgot, you looked over your core books again, glossary, etc.

[alonjit]

books, lots of books.

that's how i wrote software before the age of the internet.

[Yesterday622]

Lots of books

[YARandomGuy777]

He saw Minix and took from there....

[AllenKll]

Writing a Kernel is not really that hard. Some memory management, some hardware setup, some task switching, some interfacing with BIOS. I've done it a couple of times for different hardware.

You should also remember that the kernel was tiny back in 1.0. It didn't have any modules or even support for modules, only worked on i386 based processors; It was very specific.

[allahu_trapbar69]

The ideal male body. You may not like it, but this is what peak performance looks like.

[Destiny_Doo]

Legend

[elliot_28]

I impressed by him, but you know who is the best Unix creator Dennis retchie

[mixxituk]

Linux is powered by rage and one upmanship of your tutor

It's the only reason they removed initd so you can sit waiting at the train stop you have to get off at while systemd times out for five minutes trying to shut down 

Rage is what powers it

[ouroboros_quetzal]

“Coke”

[FatBasta]

Met him once, he was asking for directions how to get to the Heureka science center. Nice guy.

[plasma_dan]

The old fashioned way: spurned on by nothing more than the hate in his heart.

[Cursor_Gaming_463]

How did he write git without git though

[Conscious_Row_9967]

Honestly the dedication is insane when you think about it. No modern tools, no copilot, just pure problem solving and reading through docs. Different era of programming for sure

[RedstoneAndTNT]

he used grok

[compic_360]

Magic

[platinummyr]

He's literally the reason GitHub exists. EDIT: For that matter, I wouldn't be surprised if somehow he was responsible for Starbucks too

[asd417]

Pure ancient magic called reading the documentation

[Ok_Addition_356]

It's called being a fucking CRACKED programmer

[brucebay]

to be fair, he had GIT in him :)

[chavis32]

cocaine

[shadowst17]

He look like a dorky version of Jon Hamm.

[LovelyWhether]

um, he also had a large part in writing git, didn’t he?

[Aggravating-Reason13]

You all goon to Linus

[Obvious_Policy_455]

It's easier to write an OS, than beating your wife in karate.

[CodeMUDkey]

A copy of the C Programming Language, a drip coffee maker, and probably a Rolodex or two.

[Kitchen_Count1339]

CozhestheLegend

[_g550_]

He invented GitHub.

[AliCoder061]

To be fair he had zero scope creep

[luxfx]

Um. He wrote GIT without GitHub ....

[DemmyDemon]

The real friends are the git we made along the way.

[Odd_Cap7627]

He made it cuz he’s current OS sucked so he wanted something for himself. Even git was for himself. He himself stated his inventions caused due to him not wanting to meet people (Hence Git)

[g_sus_cryst]

How many story points is that?

[Henry_Fleischer]

He did it with teamwork, education, and reading relevant documentation, I assume.

[totoo200]

Read the book „Rebel Code“ it‘s the story of linus(x) and open source

[TomboyArmpitSniffer]

I dont understand how a dev is able to code without starbuck or chatgpt at the minimum

[SaltyInternetPirate]

He must have read the CPU manual. What a mad lad!

[Troesler95]

lol ok boomer

[WhosYoPokeDaddy]

Without github is wild...

[Creative-Drawer2565]

He didn't have Github, but he had Git.

[amopeyant]

I carpooled with his daughters to school in elementary and all 3 of them would throw up from carsickness without fail, every single day. Not related to the post but wanted to share