> I hate kqueue because, in all likelihood, I'll never get to use it in a production system, because it's not in Linux.
Cathedrals can be nice to look at. Bazaars are often more functional.
Except that FreeBSD is functional in production, so what is the actual problem? That market effects and accidents of history resulted in Linux becoming more widely adopted?
What does that argue for, exactly?
If Linux became more popular/more widely supported by mere chance, then there's nothing to argue about, and nothing to learn...
It's not chance, but it was very likely due to market conditions that have little to do with development methodologies or outright code quality.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USL_v._BSDi was hugely crippling at a very critical moment.
In a similar vein, PostgreSQL lost out to MySQL in no small part due to:
- PHP supported MySQL out of the box.
- MySQL was slightly easier to get running.
If there's a lesson we ought to learn, it's that market success may be partially or fully disassociated from actual merit relative to other market entrants. We've seen this in commercial software. It would be foolish to think it doesn't apply to open-source.
Planning ahead can lead to great things. The Notre Dame, and the dozens of other cathedrals throughout Europe are positively stunning...
I love and I hate kqueue. I mean, I love kqueue. I love the way it can be used from C, I love the way it's integrated in MacRuby...I spent the weekend studying Clojure's reducers and was dying to have some time to work on ClojureC just so I could implement reducers with kqueue...
I hate kqueue because, in all likelihood, I'll never get to use it in a production system, because it's not in Linux.
Cathedrals can be nice to look at. Bazaars are often more functional.