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People can be ruthless without being abusive. Linus had effectively ultimate power over the kernel for quite some time, so he could have said things like: "I d

People can be ruthless without being abusive. Linus had effectively ultimate power over the kernel for quite some time, so he could have said things like: "I disagree with this patch and I'm not going to merge it. It does these things wrong, and this line of reasoning makes no sense. Change these things and explain the reasoning behind this and I'll look at it again." Most of his rants that I've read could have been summarized by that without including any personal attacks.

wolfgke 8y ago
> People can be ruthless without being abusive. Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not.
- cowmoo728 8y ago
  One of Linus's more colorful rants: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"
  - Rainymood 8y ago
    Honestly it's a well-crafted insult, I give him that
    - notriddle 8y ago
      If this werea Shakespeare play, it would be. But in real life, we have to worry about being honest. And it's honestly not true that anyone who reads a byte at a time is too dumb to operate a nipple. All it means is that whoever did it doesn't know much about syscalls.
      - lowry 8y ago
        It will be remembered as well as Shakespeare play.
    - brandonjm 8y ago
      > should be retroactively aborted > well-crafted insult This is unnecessary vitriol directed at the person themselves as opposed to their code. It achieves nothing. He could get the same message across with far less words if he stuck to outlining the problem as opposed to attacking the creator of the problem.
  - rusk 8y ago
    Entertaining though in fairness. Often he’s saying what we’re thinking. That doesn’t make it right though and it’s ultimately self-defeating.
    - saagarjha 8y ago
      While I think reading in data one byte at a time is a stupid, I wouldn’t quite say that what he said is what I was thinking.
      - rusk 8y ago
        No but you know what I mean. We’ve all been there, looking at some effedup code and cursing the goon who dared check it in. Usually just end up sighing and getting on with it. I suppose Linuses appeal in this regard is similar to Simon Cowell or Anne Robinson off the weakest link. Sometimes you just like to see stupid called out.
        mcny 8y ago
        I am also a stupid programmer. However, the difference is that I try not to submit pull requests if I have no idea what I am doing. However, from what I am reading, these are not naive programmers who don't know what they're doing. From what I understand, most of the people that Linus rants about are employees of corporate sponsors of the Linux Foundation. This is entirely my conjecture and I have no way of proving it but I suspect Linus taking a break is Intel flexing its muscles on the Linux Foundation.
        rusk 8y ago
        From what I’ve read about some of these rants corporate sponsorship != competence and there’s one or two things in my recollection that were astoundingly stupid. Schoolboy errors, in code that’s supposed to run in kernel space. I get that he kind of feels that he shouldn’t be in a position of having to spoonfeed people. Not condoning his rants, like I say it’s ultimately upon himself these reflect badly, and they probably do little to stem the flow of incompetence ...
  - FeepingCreature 8y ago
    He's not wrong. That's pretty fucking dumb.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    I know a fellow who did that. He had never written a program before, read the manual, and wrote the code. He explained it in terms of the manual never said that system calls were slow.
  - DoreenMichele 8y ago
    That's actually the funniest damn thing I've read in a while. Totally unprofessional and inappropriate for the context, but hilarious. Maybe he needs a creative writing hobby of some sort as an outlet to help keep such glorious color out of his professional emails. (I'm totally serious and would email him the suggestion if I didn't think it a waste of time because I don't know the man, he doesn't know me, yadda.)
    - cowmoo728 8y ago
      It would be great in a satire or fifty shades of grey: programming edition spinoff
  - hoosieree 8y ago
    This is somewhat ironic considering Linux is written in C, which is the most stubbornly "one thing at a time" language in widespread use today.
    - twtw 8y ago
      It's not ironic at all. C doesn't not do anything promoting a syscall per byte. Even if you think that's what you are doing, libc is probably buffering for you behind the scenes.
      - LukeShu 8y ago
        If you're using fopen(3) "stdio" (buffered I/O), then yeah, fread(3) and friends will buffer. But if you're using open(2) and read(2), libc's not going to buffer that.
    - umanwizard 8y ago
      For example?
      - hoosieree 8y ago
        - C-style strings are null-terminated, with no information about their length - no equivalent of "for item in items" or "map" because no native data type has any concept of its length - array-to-pointer decay Modern assembly languages - for processors that have SIMD or AVX instructions - are more natively able to deal with several things at one time than C is.
- dx87 8y ago
  Very true. I remember when one of the kernel maintainers announced why she was going to stop contributing, one of the reasons listed was "Linus has advocated physical abuse of kernel maintainers." Looking at the email that was given as evidence though, Linus told one of the maintainers something like "You're over 6 feet tall, if the contributors won't give you their patches in time to be merged, say you'll smash them :)" Hopefully Linus figures out a way to stop the over the top aggression while on break, but still keeps his no-nonsense attitude towards development.
  - zeroname 8y ago
    Saying that "Linus has advocated physical abuse" based on that statement is completely disingenuous. It's an absurd interpretation. It was obviously humor and it wasn't insulting either. There are several cases where Linus went way over the top with insults, but throwing him under the bus because of that statement is ridiculous. That's the whole problem with these CoCs, if people get to apply the most uncharitable interpretation of any statement, we can't have anything but extremely formalized conversation, lest we run the risk of getting kicked out because someone who doesn't like us misrepresented our words.
    - skookumchuck 8y ago
      For an example of what you're talking about, it's what diplomats do. Where a careless word misinterpreted across different cultures and languages could start a war, diplomats have learned to be, er, "diplomatic".
      - Ygg2 8y ago
        Yeah, we should all be like career politicians and learn to say nothing with as many words as possible.
        comesee 8y ago
        Hence the rise of political correctness, i.e. the art of saying nothing
- woodandsteel 8y ago
  >Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not. Correct. That means that you should, if possible, 1) try to communicate in a manner that most people won't consider abusive 2) adjust to the individual when needed. All of which Linus is saying he wasn't doing.
derefr 8y ago
Sure. It takes a certain level of emotional passion to actually keep driving you forward in this kind of project, though, and that passion will come out in a "naive conversational style" as brusqueness and even personal attacks. It takes a certain level of self-awareness to realize that you should still say what you're thinking, but you shouldn't say it how you're thinking of it.
Sharlin 8y ago
Simply not accepting poor patches isn't ruthlessness though. It's just doing your job. Ruthlessness is disregarding negative externalities (in this case, people's feelings) in pursuit of a goal. Abuse is just one tool among others. Almost certainly Linus didn't write his rants in order to gain some sort of sadistic pleasure (certainly to relieve his own frustration, however!) but he truly believed it was for the greater good and, if we're to believe him, he wasn't actually aware of how much his words could hurt. I guess what would be called abusive by many was merely a "stern talking-to" to Linus.
- hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
  Almost certainly Linus didn't write his rants in order to gain some sort of sadistic pleasure I don't find that assertion convincing. I guess what would be called abusive by many was merely a "stern talking-to" to Linus. Which is why he needs therapy. It would be great if we would hold ourselves to higher standard of professionalism and stop apologizing for toxic behavior in software engineering. I've never seen another industry where abusive infighting is considered acceptable and necessary for success. It's almost worn as a badge of honor by people who -- more often than not -- aren't even that good.
  - tomp 8y ago
    > It would be great if we would hold ourselves to higher standard of professionalism and stop apologizing for toxic behavior in software engineering. Or we could take an alternative route, and collectively grow a thicker skin and show a bit more emotional maturity, instead of seeking offence in every situation. But then that's just my opinion. But that's the point, opinions differ.
    - headsoup 8y ago
      What does 'growing thicker skin' mean then? How thick? Shall I start to bully you and we'll test the thickness of skin required? I get the sense that often the people that write these kinds of comments are not on the receiving end of the behaviour.
    - 8y ago
HaoZeke 8y ago
Bull. His rants were meant to make people work harder. Nothing more. Nothing less.
- notacoward 8y ago
  Then why would he change? What evidence do you have that he would agree with your interpretation? It seems like you're making excuses for someone who has just rather emphatically eschewed them. That makes no sense, unless you're really making excuses for someone else.

wolfgke 8y ago

> People can be ruthless without being abusive. Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not.

cowmoo728 8y ago
One of Linus's more colorful rants: "Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"
- Rainymood 8y ago
  Honestly it's a well-crafted insult, I give him that
  - notriddle 8y ago
    If this werea Shakespeare play, it would be. But in real life, we have to worry about being honest. And it's honestly not true that anyone who reads a byte at a time is too dumb to operate a nipple. All it means is that whoever did it doesn't know much about syscalls.
    - lowry 8y ago
      It will be remembered as well as Shakespeare play.
  - brandonjm 8y ago
    > should be retroactively aborted > well-crafted insult This is unnecessary vitriol directed at the person themselves as opposed to their code. It achieves nothing. He could get the same message across with far less words if he stuck to outlining the problem as opposed to attacking the creator of the problem.
- rusk 8y ago
  Entertaining though in fairness. Often he’s saying what we’re thinking. That doesn’t make it right though and it’s ultimately self-defeating.
  - saagarjha 8y ago
    While I think reading in data one byte at a time is a stupid, I wouldn’t quite say that what he said is what I was thinking.
    - rusk 8y ago
      No but you know what I mean. We’ve all been there, looking at some effedup code and cursing the goon who dared check it in. Usually just end up sighing and getting on with it. I suppose Linuses appeal in this regard is similar to Simon Cowell or Anne Robinson off the weakest link. Sometimes you just like to see stupid called out.
      - mcny 8y ago
        I am also a stupid programmer. However, the difference is that I try not to submit pull requests if I have no idea what I am doing. However, from what I am reading, these are not naive programmers who don't know what they're doing. From what I understand, most of the people that Linus rants about are employees of corporate sponsors of the Linux Foundation. This is entirely my conjecture and I have no way of proving it but I suspect Linus taking a break is Intel flexing its muscles on the Linux Foundation.
        rusk 8y ago
        From what I’ve read about some of these rants corporate sponsorship != competence and there’s one or two things in my recollection that were astoundingly stupid. Schoolboy errors, in code that’s supposed to run in kernel space. I get that he kind of feels that he shouldn’t be in a position of having to spoonfeed people. Not condoning his rants, like I say it’s ultimately upon himself these reflect badly, and they probably do little to stem the flow of incompetence ...
- FeepingCreature 8y ago
  He's not wrong. That's pretty fucking dumb.
- skookumchuck 8y ago
  I know a fellow who did that. He had never written a program before, read the manual, and wrote the code. He explained it in terms of the manual never said that system calls were slow.
- DoreenMichele 8y ago
  That's actually the funniest damn thing I've read in a while. Totally unprofessional and inappropriate for the context, but hilarious. Maybe he needs a creative writing hobby of some sort as an outlet to help keep such glorious color out of his professional emails. (I'm totally serious and would email him the suggestion if I didn't think it a waste of time because I don't know the man, he doesn't know me, yadda.)
  - cowmoo728 8y ago
    It would be great in a satire or fifty shades of grey: programming edition spinoff
- hoosieree 8y ago
  This is somewhat ironic considering Linux is written in C, which is the most stubbornly "one thing at a time" language in widespread use today.
  - twtw 8y ago
    It's not ironic at all. C doesn't not do anything promoting a syscall per byte. Even if you think that's what you are doing, libc is probably buffering for you behind the scenes.
    - LukeShu 8y ago
      If you're using fopen(3) "stdio" (buffered I/O), then yeah, fread(3) and friends will buffer. But if you're using open(2) and read(2), libc's not going to buffer that.
  - umanwizard 8y ago
    For example?
    - hoosieree 8y ago
      - C-style strings are null-terminated, with no information about their length - no equivalent of "for item in items" or "map" because no native data type has any concept of its length - array-to-pointer decay Modern assembly languages - for processors that have SIMD or AVX instructions - are more natively able to deal with several things at one time than C is.
dx87 8y ago
Very true. I remember when one of the kernel maintainers announced why she was going to stop contributing, one of the reasons listed was "Linus has advocated physical abuse of kernel maintainers." Looking at the email that was given as evidence though, Linus told one of the maintainers something like "You're over 6 feet tall, if the contributors won't give you their patches in time to be merged, say you'll smash them :)" Hopefully Linus figures out a way to stop the over the top aggression while on break, but still keeps his no-nonsense attitude towards development.
- zeroname 8y ago
  Saying that "Linus has advocated physical abuse" based on that statement is completely disingenuous. It's an absurd interpretation. It was obviously humor and it wasn't insulting either. There are several cases where Linus went way over the top with insults, but throwing him under the bus because of that statement is ridiculous. That's the whole problem with these CoCs, if people get to apply the most uncharitable interpretation of any statement, we can't have anything but extremely formalized conversation, lest we run the risk of getting kicked out because someone who doesn't like us misrepresented our words.
  - skookumchuck 8y ago
    For an example of what you're talking about, it's what diplomats do. Where a careless word misinterpreted across different cultures and languages could start a war, diplomats have learned to be, er, "diplomatic".
    - Ygg2 8y ago
      Yeah, we should all be like career politicians and learn to say nothing with as many words as possible.
      - comesee 8y ago
        Hence the rise of political correctness, i.e. the art of saying nothing
woodandsteel 8y ago
>Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not. Correct. That means that you should, if possible, 1) try to communicate in a manner that most people won't consider abusive 2) adjust to the individual when needed. All of which Linus is saying he wasn't doing.

derefr 8y ago

Sure. It takes a certain level of emotional passion to actually keep driving you forward in this kind of project, though, and that passion will come out in a "naive conversational style" as brusqueness and even personal attacks. It takes a certain level of self-awareness to realize that you should still say what you're thinking, but you shouldn't say it how you're thinking of it.

Sharlin 8y ago

Simply not accepting poor patches isn't ruthlessness though. It's just doing your job. Ruthlessness is disregarding negative externalities (in this case, people's feelings) in pursuit of a goal. Abuse is just one tool among others. Almost certainly Linus didn't write his rants in order to gain some sort of sadistic pleasure (certainly to relieve his own frustration, however!) but he truly believed it was for the greater good and, if we're to believe him, he wasn't actually aware of how much his words could hurt. I guess what would be called abusive by many was merely a "stern talking-to" to Linus.

hfdgiutdryg 8y ago
Almost certainly Linus didn't write his rants in order to gain some sort of sadistic pleasure I don't find that assertion convincing. I guess what would be called abusive by many was merely a "stern talking-to" to Linus. Which is why he needs therapy. It would be great if we would hold ourselves to higher standard of professionalism and stop apologizing for toxic behavior in software engineering. I've never seen another industry where abusive infighting is considered acceptable and necessary for success. It's almost worn as a badge of honor by people who -- more often than not -- aren't even that good.
- tomp 8y ago
  > It would be great if we would hold ourselves to higher standard of professionalism and stop apologizing for toxic behavior in software engineering. Or we could take an alternative route, and collectively grow a thicker skin and show a bit more emotional maturity, instead of seeking offence in every situation. But then that's just my opinion. But that's the point, opinions differ.
  - headsoup 8y ago
    What does 'growing thicker skin' mean then? How thick? Shall I start to bully you and we'll test the thickness of skin required? I get the sense that often the people that write these kinds of comments are not on the receiving end of the behaviour.
  - 8y ago

HaoZeke 8y ago

Bull. His rants were meant to make people work harder. Nothing more. Nothing less.

notacoward 8y ago
Then why would he change? What evidence do you have that he would agree with your interpretation? It seems like you're making excuses for someone who has just rather emphatically eschewed them. That makes no sense, unless you're really making excuses for someone else.