Linus has a touch of what I think makes Steve Jobs great: the ability to say no and stick by those convictions. No argument from me that Linux is wildly successful and one of the most important tech developments in the last 10 years. However, I always cringe when I read some of his comments that seem to reject any element of forward progress. While C++ certainly has its share of issues, Linux will never evolve if the…
From linus's post - "And the best way to avoid communication is to have some "culture" - which is just another way to say "collection of rules that don't even need to be written down/spoken, since people are aware of it". Sure, we obviously have a lot of documentation about how things are supposed to be done, but exactly as with any regular human culture, documentationis kind of secondary."
He seems to suggest that sticking C keeps the focus on attracting people who like to build things. There are surely very productive programmers who use c++ and other newer languages but sometimes embracing new developments means opening the door to people who are just following fads. Just as an example - the kernel has managed to avoid the following developments - uml, xml etc. Not saying that uml and xml dont have their legitimate uses, but sometimes keeping things bare and simple has the effect of keeping posers out. As a sidenote, I dont seem to recollect any recent groundbreaking progress in languages for systems level programming (singularity from microsoft might be an exception). At some point people were trying things like oberon, lisp machines, but I dont seem to recall any new developments which explore dynamically different ways of building computer systems. For better or for worse we seem to have settled on a local optima of c and unix based systems.