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Weeding out is useless because there are far more "poor" or "average" developers than there are "great" developers. This means that you're catering to the tail

Weeding out is useless because there are far more "poor" or "average" developers than there are "great" developers. This means that you're catering to the tail end of a distribution and are way more likely to progress at a significantly slower rate because you're looking for the 10% of the population that is "the best". Also, that scale is quite subjective and opinionated. While I didn't get this opinion from my read of Linus's post, Linus seems to want to make things unnecessarily hard and somehow fails to see how that could be bad because of lack of arguments while simultaneously claiming making things easy would just be bad outright with little supporting arguments for it. I was under the impression that software should be made as simple and easy to understand as possible. So for example, should I make some esoteric bit manipulation to multiply a number by 2^n or should I just use a library function? It may make sense if performance and memory are limited, but that's about the only reasons I can think of. Otherwise, you should have the code explicitly state your intent. It makes me think the kernel is a garbled mess they way its talked about in that post with not very easy ways of maintaining it.

ben509 8y ago
> This means that you're catering to the tail end of a distribution and are way more likely to progress at a significantly slower rate because you're looking for the 10% of the population that is "the best". It seems like he'd exactly agree. He goes on to say he doesn't want to add all those features, he'd rather go slower and his biggest job is to say "no" to new features.
- jshowa3 8y ago
  But Linus is not god and is prone to his own biases. The fact that he's at the top and reviews all the commits is simply a product of history more than anything. I'm sure there have been several "average" developers that have worked on kernel code and submitted it just by the shear effort needed to maintain such a large code base. I guess, my original point is, there will be "average" developers committing to the kernel just by statistics alone.
magduf 8y ago
Have you actually looked at the kernel code or worked with it? It's some of the cleanest code I've ever seen. It does have to do some things very differently due to it being kernel code rather than userspace, and it is a VERY large codebase (esp. when you add in all the driver code), but aside from that it's quite nice IMO. Most commercial projects I've worked on really were a "garbled mess" by comparison, and far less maintainable.
- jshowa3 8y ago
  I've looked at some of it. But its been a long time.

ben509 8y ago

> This means that you're catering to the tail end of a distribution and are way more likely to progress at a significantly slower rate because you're looking for the 10% of the population that is "the best". It seems like he'd exactly agree. He goes on to say he doesn't want to add all those features, he'd rather go slower and his biggest job is to say "no" to new features.

jshowa3 8y ago
But Linus is not god and is prone to his own biases. The fact that he's at the top and reviews all the commits is simply a product of history more than anything. I'm sure there have been several "average" developers that have worked on kernel code and submitted it just by the shear effort needed to maintain such a large code base. I guess, my original point is, there will be "average" developers committing to the kernel just by statistics alone.

magduf 8y ago

Have you actually looked at the kernel code or worked with it? It's some of the cleanest code I've ever seen. It does have to do some things very differently due to it being kernel code rather than userspace, and it is a VERY large codebase (esp. when you add in all the driver code), but aside from that it's quite nice IMO. Most commercial projects I've worked on really were a "garbled mess" by comparison, and far less maintainable.

jshowa3 8y ago
I've looked at some of it. But its been a long time.