He's a perfectionist and he seems to get distracted easily.
Like me, he seems to overly inured to the siren song of Force Multipliers (making other people more productive) and really should have spent more time practicing the craft.
If I had it to do over again I probably would have spent a little more time coding and a little less of it thinking in my late 20's to early 30's. It would make a broader group of people understand what I'm about. Especially bosses who don't understand that it would take three people to replace me, even though the majority of the team close more bugs than I do.
In fact, Donald Knuth is so below average from a productivity standpoint that there is an entire book published about books and papers that Donald Knuth published: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cp.html
Aside from Art, the Tex books, his earlier work on computational complexity and the one on AI, isn't most of the rest of that his bound lecture notes?
His extremely long side rail into typography was mostly what I was talking about. Art was left unfinished that entire time.
That's not what the parent comment was suggesting. Someone like Knuth isn't accused of valuing politics over technical merit because he simply addresses technical merit in a polite way. I'm not one of the people who cares all that much that Linus is an ass to people on a mailing list, but it's ludicrous to suggest that his being an ass on a mailing list is necessary to convey a technical point.