Messages in this thread |  | | Subject | Re: Availability of kdb | From | Gary Lawrence Murphy <> | Date | 11 Sep 2000 09:40:36 -0400 |
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>>>>> "H" == Horst von Brand <vonbrand@sleipnir.valparaiso.cl> writes:
H> In the end, this is Linus' game. If you want to play, you'll H> have to pay the admission price he sets.
Is it fair to ask about the purpose of Linux?
The purpose I most often hear talks about world domination and about having the best O/S on the maximum number of platforms, with appeals to "open source" to ensure quality control and technical progress. That goal says nothing about the grain of the wood or the vanity of the carpenter. It is all about being of service to a greater social good. Maybe I misunderstood.
The analogy to typing hex codes or toggling code at the console is also apt. Unix ascended over Multix in no small part because of C, which drew sneers from the trad programmer of the day. Personally, I tend to debug intuitively based on my knowledge of code, but not exclusively. In my 25 years in this business, I have seen amazing things done with debuggers, things that had stumped whole teams of very good programmers. Intuition still plays a vital role, but gdb in the right hands can prove things that would take months of code tweaking to do by hand.
I'll risk yet another metaphor ;) ...
While composing music, I can use a pen and staff paper and work out harmonic and melogic lines at a piano, but I limit myself. With much respect to the pre-digital composers, this work is prohibitively tedious and demands a vibrant imagination when you must produce 102 parts for an orchestra, and this method severely restricted the harmonic sense of pre-electronic composition as they grafted the wave-form harmonics of the piano to all other instruments. Harry Partch took us one step towards a different sense of harmony, but had to rest on ideal and imaginary instruments because he could not manage the complexity of instrument timbres using manual methods.
Also, if I want to be modern, if I need to step outside the euro-centric equal-tempered scale and classical rhythm, notation quickly becomes a handicap (see John Cage's "Notations"). Using software tools, I gain fine control, I can more rapidly experiment with scenarios, and I can manage many orders of magnitude more complexity. I find the same is true with software tools.
Tools should serve and extend the body, not enslave the mind. Yes, I can walk to my nearest village and yes I will see more fine detail of nature if I walk and will excercise my heart, but my bicycle makes it practical to do this 20km trek as a day trip, and a car makes it possible to go shopping.
It all depends on my purpose.
-- Gary Lawrence Murphy <garym@linux.ca>: office voice/fax: 01 519 4222723 T(!c)Inc Business Innovation through Open Source http://www.teledyn.com M:I-3 - Documenting the Linux kernel: http://kernelbook.sourceforge.net "You don't play what you know; you play what you hear." --- Miles Davis - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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