In Praise of Modularity
One of Linus Torvalds' greatest contributions to free software – and, indeed, to software in general – came about purely by chance. As he told me back in 1996, as he reflected on how the Linux kernel had come about and grown:
"the way the whole system is set up - which ... happened kind of by itself - is that if you change one driver it's really so localised that it should never impact anything else."
The reason was simple:
"It has to be so, when there's people all over the world doing this. I can't meet them - there's no weekly brainstorming session where everybody gets together and discusses things. "
In other words, the fact that he was working from his bedroom in Helsinki, with a team of coders around the world, whom he had never met, linked by the Internet, meant that the work on the kernel had to be parcelled out in a very precise way. This, in its turn, meant that the interface between the parcels had to be kept very clean – there was no scope for “fudges” to make stuff work.
The knock-on consequence of this well-organised code was that new modules could be swapped in extremely easily. So when somebody came up with a better solution to a particular part of the kernel it was relatively easy to adopt it. This drove an extremely rapid evolution of the code while preserving great robustness.
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