Anonymous user
Beginner Mistakes: Difference between revisions
m
→A Hard Truth
| [unchecked revision] | [unchecked revision] |
(→A Hard Truth: Linux) |
m (→A Hard Truth) |
||
Line 21:
It was one thing for someone like Dennis Ritchie, Richard Greenblatt, Gary Kildall, or Steve Wozniak to write a simple OS for hardware which was relatively straight-forward in comparison to current machines, which they already knew intimately, and which had no standards specifications to adhere to or existing cruft to maintain backwards compatibility with. This is no longer true on current-generation stock hardware. Furthermore, each of them was already a seasoned engineer who had already done years of systems programming. Even then, they only provided the foundations for the systems; the bulk of the work was done by small armies of subordinate developers after the nucleus of the system - the kernel, in modern jargon - was in place.
There are exceptions to this rule, but not many; don't expect yourself to be that one in a thousand. And for the record, Linus Torvalds wasn't quite one of them - he was a graduate student when he wrote the Linux kernel, and had been coding in C for years, and while it he was well short of that ten year mark, he had more time on his hands than most people would - and the 'Linux 0.0.1' release he famously posted to USENET in 1991 was little more than a round-robin scheduler, nowhere close to a full system.
While it is true that most of the contributors to this wiki started much sooner, for most of us, that was a mistake born out of a lack of experience. Most of the pioneers of this group had no idea of the sheer scale and complexity of even a small OS project, no inkling of what they were getting themselves into. This was a difficult pill to swallow, especially back '''before''' resources like this Wiki were widely available. We cannot force you to learn from our mistakes, but at least we can pass on this warning.
| |||