Another reason to avoid the unqualified term "architecture" when speaking either of instruction sets or chip designs; person A may read "architecture" as "instruction set architecture" and person B may read it as "microarchitecture". I suspect they're talking about a new microarchitecture, implementing the x86-64 instruction set architecture, here.

This is why the term "microarchitecture" is useful. In addition to the term "instruction set", the term "instruction set architecture" is also used, so "architecture" is used for both.

Yeah, those former Manhattan Project scientists and engineers sure hated science.

If they started with 192kg of U-233, there'd be a lot more than 96kg of U-233 and a lot less than 96 kg of Pb around at this point.

One thing you said was "Teaching people to rack servers and install operating systems becomes for focused and resembles learning a trade." "Teaching people to rack servers and install operating systems" is, of course, not part of computer science at all; it's also not part of coding, so its relevance to a discussion of coding and/or computer science is, at best, unclear.

(Presumably you're not saying something completely insane, such as likening teaching computer science to teaching people to rack servers and install operating systems. Anybody who "gets" that is completely delusional or completely ignorant of computer science.)

Nope, so I won't bother arguing with you any more.

What he said was "There are elements of coding that require planning, logic and completeness that have impacts far beyond computer science. Teaching people to rack servers and install operating systems becomes for focused and resembles learning a trade."

This says nothing about the latter two items not being elements of coding, so, no, that's not what he said.

He doesn't explicitly say they are elements of coding, but he mentions them in a sentence immediately following a sentence that mentions elements of coding, and does so in a comment to an article discussing coding, so, if he thinks they're not elements of coding, it's not clear why he bothered to mention at all.

Neither racking servers nor installing operating systems are elements of coding. They may be useful skills, but they have nothing to do with coding.

Yes, that was precisely my point - does all the extra code make systemd almost 10x better than launchd, or is it better but not by as much, or is it no better or even worse?

To ask what benefits the additional almost-9x code brings (especially if the result is deemed inferior)?

Poettering was most definitely aware of launchd.

.c and .h files in top-of-trunk systemd as of a "git pull" done a minute or so ago:

$ find . -name '*.[ch]' -print | xargs wc -l | tail -1
252223 total

.c and .h files in launchd-842.90.1, which opensource.apple.com claims is what's in OS X 10.9.2 (did they just release 10.9.2?):

$ find . -name '*.[ch]' -print | xargs wc -l | tail -1
26790 total

Yes, that's almost a factor of 10.

...by being the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech (and not under legal threat from AT&T) Unix-compatible OS.

...and that was most definitely not the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech version control system capable of over-the-network access (and not, as far as I know, even the first widely-available, free-as-in-beer-and-speech distributed version control system).

(And it makes some things harder if you're "holding it wrong", but I digress.)

It's "just a technicality" in the sense that Android might not exist if Linux hadn't existed; saying that it's less relevant because people don't know it's there is like saying that ARM isn't all that important because most people don't know they have ARM processors in their smartphones. Git is even less directly relevant to most people, as they're not developers.

Presumably you meant "by creating Git"; as far as I know, he no more created GitHub than he created Android, even if GitHub uses Git and Android uses Linux.

Given that many projects don't use Git, I would not even come close to saying that Git is virtually indispensable in development (unless "virtually" means "not" or otherwise renders the adjective to which it refers meaningless).

I would say that some form of version control is important, but there were plenty of free-software version control systems, supporting over-the-Internet access, available before Git came along, so you can't give credit to Git for that.

I'd love to know the reasons that lead some to believe that "In some ways Git can be seen as his more important contribution".