Linus built git in 8 days or something.

materielle 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No he didn’t. He built a proof of concept demo in 7 days then handed it off to other maintainers to code for real. I’m not sure why this myth keeps getting repeated. Linus himself clarifies this in every interview about git.

His main contributions were his ideas.

1) The distributed model, that doesn’t need to dial the internet.

2) The core data structures. For instance, how git stores snapshots for files changes in a commit. Other tools used diff approaches which made rewinding, branch switching, and diffing super slow.

Those two ideas are important and influenced git deeply, but he didn’t code the thing, and definitely not in 7 days!

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ergocoder 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That's just being pedantic for the sake of it.

Git is decades old. Of course, there are tons of contributions after the first 10 days. Everyone knows that.

He started it and built the first working version.

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globular-toast 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

He did what needed to be done. Linux similarly has thousands of contributors and Linus's personal "code contribution" is almost negligible these days. But code doesn't matter. Literally anyone can generate thousands of lines of code that will flip bits all day long. What matters is some combination of the following: a vision, respect from peers earned with technical brilliance, audaciousness, tenacity, energy, dedication etc. This is what makes Linus special. Not his ability to bash on a keyboard all day long.

	▲	srdjanr 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The point was only that Linus didn't build git in 8 days and alone.

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grogenaut 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Nah, on the 7th day he rested... On the 8th he apologized for his behavior having learned the error of his ways.

On the ninth he roasted some fool.

	▲	sph 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I wish we had old Linus back just one day to review some vibecoded patch to Linux. I’d love to hear him rant about it.

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dvdyzag 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

In a cave, with a box of scraps!