You’ve circled back to the same point the person you’re replying to was supporting: “ the problem is one of cultural context which is often not shared between

You’ve circled back to the same point the person you’re replying to was supporting: “ the problem is one of cultural context which is often not shared between generations of coders. “ There is no such thing as absolutely good code. It’s context dependent and context tends to be ephemeral. The Linux kernel is in some ways an exception, but also appreciated by a pretty small group. The rant against the kernel code is meant to be illustrative - if you don’t know the conventions, abbreviations, if you’re not operating in the context of an early 21st century OS, where memory is handled manually, none of this looks particularly great. Code is cultural and cultures are niche and ever changing. Particularly these days. The same technology that enabled the fast rise of, say, Ruby, or Go, or Rust makes your code and my code depreciate quite quickly.