The biggest tragedy of modern media is that they chose to cast Elon Musk as the real life Tony Stark instead of torvalds who created 2 pieces of truly revolutionary software (with the help of thousands of other engineers ofc)

I expected someone to say that, and boom first comment lol

Be thankful we got Javascript. We might have had TCL! 😱

Interesting footnote: the founding of Netscape occurred at the same time I was deciding where to go in industry when I left Berkeley in 1994. Jim Clarke and Marc Andreessen approached me about the possibility of my joining Netscape as a founder, but I eventually decided against it (they hadn't yet decided to do Web stuff when I talked with them). This is one of the biggest "what if" moments of my career. If I had gone to Netscape, I think there's a good chance that Tcl would have become the browser language instead of JavaScript and the world would be a different place! However, in retrospect I'm not sure that Tcl would actually be a better language for the Web than JavaScript, so maybe the right thing happened.

Definitely dodged a bullet there. Although on the other hand if it had been TCL there's pretty much zero chance people would have tolerated it like they have with Javascript so it might have been replaced with something better than both. Who knows...

Handing over maintainership was not a hard choice. It was very much: "The moment somebody else comes along that I can trust to keep it going, I'll go back to doing just the kernel."

Priorities

If Mercurial were as popular as Git I would presume that it would be rewritten in C or Rust, but who can say.

Principle of least permission. I'm a dev and I still have to ask for temporary permission to even access customer infrastructure to solve production issues. Why should you need access to deployment infrastructure? I would deny you too, especially if your need could be solved by a local install of git.