Taste is malleable and relative. One can even entertain different notions of taste. I personally have at least two – "understandable" and "performant" – and they aren't always (but sometimes are) exclusive of each other.

I suspect Linus's "taste", given Linux's problem domain, tuned to some combination of performant + testable + reviewable + portable. In the example given, Linus's rewrite meets these requirements; hence his assertion that it is in better taste.

I feel at this point, the notion of 'good taste' has become even more ill-defined, something very personal. Then the notion is not very useful as a coding guideline.

There isn't a domain where taste isn't personal. It's always a blend of art and science. Just because you can't define it exactly though, doesn't mean you can't get closer to it by working at it.

Are you seriously arguing that Linus would think cleanly performant code is not in good taste? You're welcome to ask him that directly and see what he says.

EDIT: Okay, I'm being excessively snarky there; my apologies.

I will say instead that is that "good taste" depends on the context. What's "good taste" for kernel development isn't necessarily the same as "good taste" for enterprise development or the same as "good taste" for app development.

As a rookie programmer (but 10 years in IT, loving maths), this was my thought exactly. Basically a matter of field/domain definition, insofar as humans still have to interact with the code.

In short: most enterprise code should be elegant and simple, even if verbose (many conditionals, as little nesting as possible, etc) so that a 12 years old can understand it, because in real life you'll get much turnover and lack of means/skill/motivation. Hence, costly maintenance, etc.

Writing an open-source kernel consistently for 20+ years is an entirely different problem, and the fact that you use code in both these examples is a distant commonality of the problem sets; it is my experience thus contention that the human factor and real world conditions are paramount to ascribing qualitative assertions such as 'good' or 'tasty'. That is, until machines program themselves or others without human oversight. ;)

Haha, getting bullied does not sound very delicious to me.