8 Linus Torvalds Quotes on Engineering

Linus Torvalds quotes on engineering

7. Your job is being a professor and researcher: That's one hell of a good excuse for some of the brain-damages of Minix.

8. If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.

39. I chose 1000 originally partly as a way to make sure that people that assumed HZ was 100 would get a swift kick in the pants.

41. The fact that ACPI was designed by a group of monkeys high on LSD, and is some of the worst designs in the industry obviously makes running it at _any_ point pretty damn ugly.

49. I will, in fact, claim that the difference between a bad programmer and a good one is whether he considers his code or his data structures more important. Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships.

64. 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.

70. The memory management on the PowerPC can be used to frighten small children.

74. 'Guess what? Wheels have been round for a really long time, and anybody who 'reinvents' the new wheel is generally considered a crackpot. It turns out that 'round' is simply a good form for a wheel to have. It may be boring, but it just tends to roll better than a square, and 'hipness' has nothing what-so-ever to do with it.'