I think Linus is making the right call here. At a 10,000 foot view, the real argument is about style. The style of C happens to be one that lends itself to ea

I think Linus is making the right call here. At a 10,000 foot view, the real argument is about style. The style of C happens to be one that lends itself to easier groking of code amongst hundreds of developers (as he illustrated well). Sure, C++ may be a more modern tool with some more powerful features, but using it may not be the best thing organizationally. This kind of thinking is refreshing and is seemingly rare in classrooms. There, you mostly learn 'what to use' and not 'how to determine what you need'. Just as I'd expect, over design is the most consistent issue I come across in co-workers' code. 'Write code to be read' is a metric that seems to have gone out of style. Code that does X-Z-Y should, in my opinion, look like code that does X-Y-Z. Otherwise the reader has to invest time and energy figuring out the design. There had better be a good reason to justify a hard-to-grok design, because it will continue to be a drain for the life of the project.