I expect more from Tannenbaum. The initial email subject is hard to take as anything other than an insult, and statements like “you would get an F in my class”

I expect more from Tannenbaum. The initial email subject is hard to take as anything other than an insult, and statements like “you would get an F in my class” really only say “I have some authority, and if I can’t make a coherent argument, I’ll still lord it over you.” I wonder how many students saw that exchange and thought “I really need to get into his class.” I think the discussion would have gone much smoother if the professor made some effort to get his message across without the unnecessary sniping. He could have simply started with “I understand Torvalds used my book, so I find it interesting—and maybe a little perplexing—that Linux has such a wildly different design from what I presented.”