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Haven't seen it. I've seen many other examples of Torvalds being an ass, but I don't bother to keep track really. It does make me wonder though how he's able t

by nxn 15y ago

Haven't seen it. I've seen many other examples of Torvalds being an ass, but I don't bother to keep track really. It does make me wonder though how he's able to get away with responses like that, when most other "founders" (not sure what the proper term here really is) would have the majority of their users/supporters just go elsewhere. EDIT: ... Let alone have supporters who get defensive enough to start downvoting someone who stated the obvious (he did act like an ass), while asking a reasonable question too.

winestock 15y ago
This man is being downvoted unfairly. I've read Torvalds' post at the top of the page. I've also read the balance of opinion on this page. The majority view is that C++ really is a terrible language for writing a kernel. Fine, I accept that. Now re-read Torvalds' post. How many people here would want to work with someone who regularly expresses himself like that? I know, I know; substance is more important than image and so forth. But that post reminds me of what people said working with Steve Jobs was like before he died. Life is too short to work with jerks. EDIT: Removed excess snark.
- gaius 15y ago
  Except it's not true: The Commodore Amiga delivered multi-tasking, shared objects and sophisticated IPC in only 256k of main memory. They cite OO techniques as being key. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga)
  - telent 15y ago
    What's not true? Exec used some OO techniques in non-OO languages. So does Linux. I can't see which post this was intended as a response to
- brodd 15y ago
  I'd say life's too short to beat around the bush.
- andos 15y ago
  You are 100% right about not wasting one's time with jerks. But I disagree that Linus regularly expresses himself like one. Really: open lkml.org and search for his posts. Most of the time, he's an ordinary project maintainer. Sometimes, he's quite the opposite of a jerk [1]: WARNING! I wasn't kidding when I said that I've done this by reading gtk2 tutorials as I've gone along. If somebody is more comfortable with gtk, feel free to send me (signed-off) patches. Just as an example of the extreme hackiness of the code, I don't even bother connecting a signal for the "somebody edited the dive info" cases. I just save/restore the dive info every single time you switch dives. Christ! That's truly lame. One must remember that his role as maintainer of linux requires him to have ultimate, non-ambiguous opinion about a lot of stuff. He's the judge of what effectively goes into the "official" kernel tree. Moreover, most of the kernel contributors don't deal with him directly — git is the materialization of that modus operandi. When he does express himself like that, however, it becomes news. He always has a reason, though. In this case: Please don't talk about portability, it's BS. Is this how normal people start a conversation? Who's the jerk, here? [1]: https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/blob/master/README#L136 https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/blob/master/README#L1...
burgerbrain 15y ago
"It does make me wonder though how he's able to get away with responses like that" The man delivers.
- acqq 15y ago
  And more than that, he's right: if you care enough about things the kernel cares about, you really, really don't want C++ "idioms" in kernel. And you don't want to work with the people who don't understand that. So it's really convenient to piss such people off, just as he said: "for something where efficiency was a primary objective the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage."
- nwmcsween 15y ago
  He delivers personally but Linux as a kernel is a pile of crap, mass duplication mdadm vs dm posix capabilities vs actual unretarded capabilities... Linus is good at coding but absolutely horrible at direction and that's exactly what Linux needs a direction for the better instead of evolution of substandard abstractions.
aidenn0 15y ago
I haven't worked closely with Torvalds, but I have worked with other OSS project leads that have such asshole responses roughly proportional to the popularity of the project, and have a theory on it. I don't know if it's intentional or not but many OSS project leads respond like this to questions that come up a lot but don't merit a response. How many times do you think Torvalds has had to field "questions" of the form "C is crap, you should use C++, it's like C only better!" To a certain extent it is garbage in, garbage out, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.
- pavanky 15y ago
  This is the situation not only with OSS projects, but BBS, forums and / or IRC chat rooms in general. Given the technology, it is amazing tha we haven't developed bots that will automatically answer these questions based on previous responses.
  - slowpoke 15y ago
    That wouldn't even be too hard. I've seen some help channels that have bots with commands to answer FAQs (mostly in the form of "here is a link, READ IT"). A simple question answering AI would be interesting, though.
    - pavanky 15y ago
      That still needs human intervention. I think stackoverflow has a bot named community. I am not completely aware of how it works, but if it is completely automated, it is good.
MBlume 15y ago
"When I first looked at Git source code two things struck me as odd: 1. Pure C as opposed to C++. No idea why. Please don't talk about portability, it's BS." Come on. Dude was picking a fight, and he got it. Maybe there are other examples of Linus being an ass, but I don't see how this qualifies.
Daniel_Newby 15y ago
This is a cherry-picked email that, while abrasive, does not single out any particular person for abuse. Messages about individual people on the linux-kernel mailing list are usually pretty professional. (Mind you, they rarely get as downright friendly as the Perl or Python people.)
wisty 15y ago
If Torvalds is either nice 99.99% of the time, and 0.01% of the time gets involved in flame wars, guess which gets reported?

by nxn 15y ago

winestock 15y ago

This man is being downvoted unfairly. I've read Torvalds' post at the top of the page. I've also read the balance of opinion on this page. The majority view is that C++ really is a terrible language for writing a kernel. Fine, I accept that. Now re-read Torvalds' post. How many people here would want to work with someone who regularly expresses himself like that? I know, I know; substance is more important than image and so forth. But that post reminds me of what people said working with Steve Jobs was like before he died. Life is too short to work with jerks. EDIT: Removed excess snark.

gaius 15y ago
Except it's not true: The Commodore Amiga delivered multi-tasking, shared objects and sophisticated IPC in only 256k of main memory. They cite OO techniques as being key. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exec_(Amiga)
- telent 15y ago
  What's not true? Exec used some OO techniques in non-OO languages. So does Linux. I can't see which post this was intended as a response to
brodd 15y ago
I'd say life's too short to beat around the bush.
andos 15y ago
You are 100% right about not wasting one's time with jerks. But I disagree that Linus regularly expresses himself like one. Really: open lkml.org and search for his posts. Most of the time, he's an ordinary project maintainer. Sometimes, he's quite the opposite of a jerk [1]: WARNING! I wasn't kidding when I said that I've done this by reading gtk2 tutorials as I've gone along. If somebody is more comfortable with gtk, feel free to send me (signed-off) patches. Just as an example of the extreme hackiness of the code, I don't even bother connecting a signal for the "somebody edited the dive info" cases. I just save/restore the dive info every single time you switch dives. Christ! That's truly lame. One must remember that his role as maintainer of linux requires him to have ultimate, non-ambiguous opinion about a lot of stuff. He's the judge of what effectively goes into the "official" kernel tree. Moreover, most of the kernel contributors don't deal with him directly — git is the materialization of that modus operandi. When he does express himself like that, however, it becomes news. He always has a reason, though. In this case: Please don't talk about portability, it's BS. Is this how normal people start a conversation? Who's the jerk, here? [1]: https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/blob/master/README#L136 https://github.com/torvalds/subsurface/blob/master/README#L1...

burgerbrain 15y ago

"It does make me wonder though how he's able to get away with responses like that" The man delivers.

acqq 15y ago
And more than that, he's right: if you care enough about things the kernel cares about, you really, really don't want C++ "idioms" in kernel. And you don't want to work with the people who don't understand that. So it's really convenient to piss such people off, just as he said: "for something where efficiency was a primary objective the "advantages" of C++ is just a huge mistake. The fact that we also piss off people who cannot see that is just a big additional advantage."
nwmcsween 15y ago
He delivers personally but Linux as a kernel is a pile of crap, mass duplication mdadm vs dm posix capabilities vs actual unretarded capabilities... Linus is good at coding but absolutely horrible at direction and that's exactly what Linux needs a direction for the better instead of evolution of substandard abstractions.

aidenn0 15y ago

I haven't worked closely with Torvalds, but I have worked with other OSS project leads that have such asshole responses roughly proportional to the popularity of the project, and have a theory on it. I don't know if it's intentional or not but many OSS project leads respond like this to questions that come up a lot but don't merit a response. How many times do you think Torvalds has had to field "questions" of the form "C is crap, you should use C++, it's like C only better!" To a certain extent it is garbage in, garbage out, if you ask a stupid question, you get a stupid answer.

pavanky 15y ago
This is the situation not only with OSS projects, but BBS, forums and / or IRC chat rooms in general. Given the technology, it is amazing tha we haven't developed bots that will automatically answer these questions based on previous responses.
- slowpoke 15y ago
  That wouldn't even be too hard. I've seen some help channels that have bots with commands to answer FAQs (mostly in the form of "here is a link, READ IT"). A simple question answering AI would be interesting, though.
  - pavanky 15y ago
    That still needs human intervention. I think stackoverflow has a bot named community. I am not completely aware of how it works, but if it is completely automated, it is good.

MBlume 15y ago

"When I first looked at Git source code two things struck me as odd: 1. Pure C as opposed to C++. No idea why. Please don't talk about portability, it's BS." Come on. Dude was picking a fight, and he got it. Maybe there are other examples of Linus being an ass, but I don't see how this qualifies.

Daniel_Newby 15y ago

This is a cherry-picked email that, while abrasive, does not single out any particular person for abuse. Messages about individual people on the linux-kernel mailing list are usually pretty professional. (Mind you, they rarely get as downright friendly as the Perl or Python people.)

wisty 15y ago

If Torvalds is either nice 99.99% of the time, and 0.01% of the time gets involved in flame wars, guess which gets reported?