[willvarfar]

Another thing that Linus says is:

> I have a soft spot for Andrew Tanenbaum’s "Operating Systems: Design and Implementation".

I too liked VB6/VBA. Actually a really productive language and development environment. Joel Spolsky describes his part in designing the language: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2006/06/16.html

[berntb]

Hey, it is a good book.

(And I don't think Tanenbaum/Linus have much problems with each others, anyway.)

On the subject: The problem with tools like VB is that they are hard to grow up in; something which both support the first steps ("baby language") and serious development.

Today Linus might argue that the scripting languages (Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc) fill this niche in the FOSS world. But with the web as GUI.

[aylons]

Well, Tannenbaum actually talks about the development of Linux and how it relates to Minix on his other book on operating systems.

Linus disagreed on the microkernel stuff of Minix and decided to build its on. So, he surely likes the Tannenbaum book on Minix, otherwise he would not have used it as a forking point.