Linus Torvalds - Program Quotes

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When you say, "I wrote a program that crashed Windows," people just stare at you blankly and say, "Hey, I got those with the system, for free."

Linus Torvalds
An infinite number of monkeys typing into GNU emacs would never make a good program.

Linus Torvalds
It was such a relief to program in user mode for a change. Not having to care about the small stuff is wonderful.

Linus Torvalds
To kind of explain what Linux is, you have to explain what an operating system is. And the thing about an operating system is that you're never ever supposed to see it. Because nobody really uses an operating system; people use programs on their computer. And the only mission in life of an operating system is to help those programs run. So an operating system never does anything on its own; it's only waiting for the programs to ask for certain resources, or ask for a certain file on the disk, or ask to connect to the outside world. And then the operating system steps in and tries to make it easy for people to write programs.

Linus Torvalds
I think Leopard is a much better system [than Windows Vista] … but OS X in some ways is actually worse than Windows to program for. Their file system is complete and utter crap, which is scary.

Linus Torvalds
Anybody who tells me I can't use a program because it's not open source, go suck on rms. I'm not interested. 99% of that I run tends to be open source, but that's my choice, dammit.

Linus Torvalds
Portability is for people who cannot write new programs.

Linus Torvalds
Your problem has nothing to do with git, and everything to do with emacs. And then you have the gall to talk about "Unix design" and not gumming programs together, when you yourself use the most gummed-up piece of absolute shit there is!

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

Linus Torvalds