Preston St. Pierre of Linux Times interviews Linus Torvalds.
Linus Torvalds tells of some other programming venues than the Linux kernel, predicts a shadowy outcome for GNU/Hurd, gives some advice to anyone wanting to undertake a large software project and updates us on the latest in kernel development in this email interview by Preston St. Pierre.
Preston: Your life has been dedicated for quite some time to the Linux kernel. If this project was no longer yours, what kind of project would you most like to take on next (games, user applications, another kernel, development tools, etc)?
Linus Torvalds: I like being close to the hardware, and doing good visuals (ie games or GUI's) is not my forte, so I'd probably work on development tools or similar.
In fact, the only project I've actually spent some time on in the last year (apart from the kernel, of course) has been this source checker application that does some extended type-checking for the kernel. So very much a development tool.
Preston: What is your favorite interpreted programming language, and why?
Linus Torvalds: Heh. I don't much do interpreters. The only one I end up using consciously (ie not part of somebody else's scripts) end up being just the regular shell. It's not that I dislike things like perl/python, it's just that I tend to either just write C, or do _so_ simple things that shell works fine for me.
I might admit to having a soft spot for basic, but I haven't actually used it in closer to twenty years or so. But it was what I started with, so it will always be special
Preston: Do you have any advice for people starting to undertake large open source projects? What have you learned by managing the Linux kernel?
Linus Torvalds: Nobody should start to undertake a large project. You start with a small _trivial_ project, and you should never expect it to get large. If you do, you'll just overdesign and generally think it is more important than it likely is at that stage. Or worse, you might be scared away by the sheer size of the work you envision.
So start small, and think about the details. Don't think about some big picture and fancy design. If it doesn't solve some fairly immediate need, it's almost certainly over-designed. And don't expect people to jump in and help you. That's not how these things work. You need to get something half-way _useful_ first, and then others will say "hey, that _almost_ works for me", and they'll get involved in the project.
And if there is anything I've learnt from Linux, it's that projects have a life of their own, and you should _not_ try to enforce your "vision" too strongly on them. Most often you're wrong anyway, and if you're not flexible and willing to take input from others (and willing to change direction when it turned out your vision was flawed), you'll never get anything good done.
In other words, be willing to admit your mistakes, and don't expect to get anywhere big in any kind of short timeframe. I've been doing Linux for thirteen years, and I expect to do it for quite some time still. If I had _expected_ to do something that big, I'd never have started. It started out small and insignificant, and that's how I thought about it.
Preston: From a user's prospective, what improvements do you see the Linux kernel offering over Hurd? Do you think Hurd might eventually become as popular as Linux?
Linus Torvalds: I think Hurd is dead. See above on why. It has a "big vision", and people forgot about the details, and forgot about admitting when they went wrong. So the project stumbled, and _still_ didn't bother to look down on the ground. But hey, I might be wrong. I haven't actually followed Hurd in any detail, and maybe the project is more down-to-earth now, and more concerned about getting things working, and less about "design". And less conceited.
Preston: When do you think Linux will take over desktop market from Microsoft?
Linus Torvalds: Oh, I think it's started already, it's just slow. You don't realize just _how_ slow it is, unless you've been looking at Linux over the last ten years. People kind of expect it to suddenly be "good enough" and take off like a rocket, but that's not how these things work. It gets better very gradually, and people get used to it very gradually. So I look back ten years, and think about how Linux was back then, and I have to chuckle a bit. The desktop of today is a bit better than it was a year ago, but you don't _really_ see the differences unless you step back a lot more..
Preston: How do you like your new job @ OSDL as a full time Linux contributor?
Linus Torvalds: It's been working out quite well. I work from home, and OSDL provides some infrastructure that allows me to get my work done without having to worry about things. Which is just how I like it
Preston: What's the latest happening in the kernel development?
Linus Torvalds: Oh, it's been more of the same. Worrying about drivers, fixing interfaces to make it harder to write bugs by mistake, and just keeping up with new hardware and new ideas. The kernel is definitely maturing in the sense that a lot of the exciting really _new_ things are all in user space, and the kernel is sometimes called upon to make them easier to work with...
http://www.linuxtimes.net/modules.php?n ... le&sid=145
