Credit where credit is due

Wincent Colaiuta:

But after closely studying Git I'm a little bit awestruck; Torvalds is a frickin' genius, a true visionary, and somehow managed to just "get it" and instantly, in a flash of insight, come up with "the solution" for version control.

Wincent then quotes a 2005 conversation between Linus and Braham Cohen to strenghten his point. Linus started using BitKeeper in 2002.

Linus Torvalds on Git:

"“BitKeeper was not only the first source control system that I ever felt was worth using at all, it was also the source control system that taught me why there's a point to them, and how you actually can do things. So Git in many ways, even though from a technical angle it is very very different from BitKeeper (which was another design goal, because I wanted to make it clear that it wasn't a BitKeeper clone), a lot of the flows we use with Git come directly from the flows we learned from BitKeeper.” - Linus Torvalds

The creator of BitKeeper, Larry McVoy on the history of BitKeeper and Larry's long history in the world of source code management.


Linus is a smart guy, but a flash of insight?