4 ms·

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

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 ...
    - matwood 8y ago
      > We’ve all been there, looking at some effedup code and cursing the goon who dared check it in. Until you realize it was you who checked it in. If you write enough code, you will eventually not write the best code for some situation. It could be because you were tired or you simply didn't understand that part of the code well enough. Instead of attacking someone with insults, it's better to understand why the code got written and work to not have similar mistakes made in the future. Remember, everyone here is on the same team trying to make the best piece of software possible. Berating teammates (which is really what is happening here) does not make them better teammates or make the team as a whole better.
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.

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 ...
  - matwood 8y ago
    > We’ve all been there, looking at some effedup code and cursing the goon who dared check it in. Until you realize it was you who checked it in. If you write enough code, you will eventually not write the best code for some situation. It could be because you were tired or you simply didn't understand that part of the code well enough. Instead of attacking someone with insults, it's better to understand why the code got written and work to not have similar mistakes made in the future. Remember, everyone here is on the same team trying to make the best piece of software possible. Berating teammates (which is really what is happening here) does not make them better teammates or make the team as a whole better.

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.