It's an interesting question why you can't simply find suckers who like to work hard, and get rich off their efforts while you sit back and do nothing. One reason is that they'd have to be stupid to let you do that, and it's not much use having stupid people working for you, no matter how hard they work.

Another reason is that having people work for you is not zero work for you. You have to tell them what to do, and often this requires a great deal of effort. In fact, it's probably not possible to have good ideas about what to do in some field without at some point having worked hard in it yourself.

This is the point where my bull shit meter hit the red area and then went on to roll on the floor and laugh :)

In his "I'm a bastard" post to the linux kernel thread in 2000, he lambasted people arguing for a kernel debugger. His argument, clear as day, says he doesn't want to work with people who depend on the debugger , he wants people to understand the code as a whole.

"Oh. And sure, when things crash and you fsck, and you didn't even get a clue about what went wrong, you get frustrated. Tough. There are two kinds of reactions to that: you start being careful, or you start whining about a kernel debugger.

Quite frankly, I'd rather weed out the people who don't start being careful early, rather than late. That sounds callous, and by God, it is callous. But it's not the kind of "if you can't stand the heat, get out the the kitchen" kind of remark that some people take it for. No, it's something much more deeper: I'd rather not work with people who aren't careful. It's Darwinism in software development."

Here, 7 years later, he applies much the same argument to C++:

"C++ is a horrible language. It's made more horrible by the fact that a lot of substandard programmers use it, to the point where it's much much easier to generate total and utter crap with it. Quite frankly, even if the choice of C were to do nothing but keep the C++ programmers out, that in itself would be a huge reason to use C."

"And limiting your project to C means that people don't screw that up, and also means that you get a lot of programmers that do actually understand low-level issues and don't screw things up with any idiotic "object model" crap."

Call him a prick, call him selfish, call him egotistical, the bottom line is he's in charge of a product that is much bigger, more complicated, diverse, mature, and successful than the majority on the planet. Smart hackers will get past their emotion and understand his principles are sound, proven, and successful.

" The fact is, that is exactly the kinds of things that C excels at. Not just as a language, but as a required mentality. One of the great strengths of C is that it doesn't make you think of your program as anything high-level. It's what makes you apparently prefer other languages, but the thing is, from a git standpoint, "high level" is exactly the wrong thing. "

and

"And if you want a fancier language, C++ is absolutely the worst one to choose. If you want real high-level, pick one that has true high-level features like garbage collection or a good system integration, rather than something that lacks both the sparseness and straightforwardness of C, and doesn't even have the high-level bindings to important concepts.

IOW, C++ is in that inconvenient spot where it doesn't help make things simple enough to be truly usable for prototyping or simple GUI programming, and yet isn't the lean system programming language that C is that actively encourags you to use simple and direct constructs."

I'm convinced that the real money comes from designing good systems. I once heard that the reason McDonald's color codes the register buttons is so that even employees who are basically illiterate can hit the right button quickly and accurately. Brilliant.

The problem with being stuck in a system like McDonald's is that even though it makes the least skilled/productive people much more efficient, it also puts a cap at how efficient you can ultimately get. I suspect the most successful people are the ones that are able to recognize when they are trapped in someone else's system, especially if it's inefficient, and break out of it.

I suspect that's the key to success in entrepreneurship too, designing good systems. What most people don't realize is that the money doesn't come from mastering systems, but from designing and creating them. The guys running scientology are making a lot more money than the guys trying to get to Thetan level whatever.

Not that designing systems isn't work, but at least it's the kind of work that one might enjoy even if one doesn't enjoy toiling away in traditional institutions.

It's hard to explain well since no one ever talks about this stuff, but hopefully this post sort of makes sense.

I think he has a unique combination of mild autism, artistic stubborness and scandanavian directness. In the end he makes valid points and he sold me on trying git.

It is hard to tell if he's being serious or if he's just making socially retarded attempts at sarcasm.

Either way he's infinitely more charming than Mr. Zuckerburg...

http://www.amazon.com/Built-Last-Successful-Visionary-Compan...