No technology can ever be too arcane

In this fake interview, Linux creator Linus Torvalds says Linux has gotten too easy to use and that’s why people use Git:

Git has taken over where Linux left off separating the geeks into know-nothings and know-it-alls. I didn’t really expect anyone to use it because it’s so hard to use, but that turns out to be its big appeal. No technology can ever be too arcane or complicated for the black t-shirt crowd.

Emphasis added.

Note: If you want to leave a comment saying Linux or Git really aren’t hard to use, lighten up. This is satire.

Related post: Advanced or just obscure?

6 thoughts on “No technology can ever be too arcane

  1. My favorite part of this is that you’re wearing a black shirt in your profile picture. Just saying.

  2. Exactly the opposite! This is funny because it’s true. Well, the linux being relatively difficult to use part anyway. I’m a programmer and long time *nix based OS user, but I switched to mac as soon as unix based OS X came out, cause I was tired of digging through compilation errors and various lib and inc directories trying to get general purpose software (ie, not command line based computational work stuff) to compile and work correctly!

    You have to be either ideologically motivated to using open source (something I have sympathy with), or a glutton for punishment to use linux instead of OS X (given you want a *nix style) for a basic desktop/laptop personal machine that’s not going to be the main node in a cluster or something.

  3. The black t-shirt crowd are so attracted to learning complex new things that those new things work like a bug light. This can be used to great effect.

    Too many mosquitos geeks at your party? Tell them you just pushed a new language/framework to github. Whoosh! They are all beating themselves to death against their laptops.

    How do I know this? Let’s just say that I seem to do a lot of cloning at parties..

  4. I think the issue with git is that it makes things that were rather arcane in svn and cvs relatively easy, particularly branching. So everyone adopts an all-branch-all-the-time style, which while easier than it would’ve been in svn, turns out to be a bit more complex than the leave-the-branching-to-the-masters style of most svn or cvs projects.

    I think there’s some conservation of effort principle at work here, like data increasing to fill disk drives or processes increasing to fill clusters.

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