I flagged this submission because it was provocative (w/ linkbait title) with no proportionately intellectual or insightful payoff.
Eh, good point, it was a bit thin on content. I probably should have let sleeping dogs lie.
As for the other comments, I'm thinking I'm reading this quite differently than others. That's cool, that's why we have a voting system I guess.
I think people understand Roman's point -- they're simply disputing his first paragraph, namely that:
- the code is "awful"
- the programmer "doesn’t know basics"
- "goto statement in C" is somehow anathema
It's not clear without more digging who the original author of the code is. Somebody pointed out that it's from drivers/usb/core/hub.c, but the blame history doesn't go further than the initial commit of the repository. That's why it's attributed to Linus Torvalds.
Most likely, the code evolved in a way that makes the goto look sillier than it did in the original version of the code.
Lest you doubt me, let me quote the final sentence which you probably didn't read after the first, and impulsively felt the need to run back to HN and show everyone how smart you are: "Author of this code is Linus Torvalds. This world is not perfect and your judging based on small peice of code just doesn’t work."
IOW, Roman might very well know C better than you do, and ironically folks like you might be the reason he wrote the post in the first place.