I ran across this interesting post by Linus and
thought some of you might find it enlightening.

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From: Linus Torvalds <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Re: Coding style - a non-issue
 
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 


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