One of Linus's more colorful rants:

"Of course, I'd also suggest that whoever was the genius who thought it was a good idea to read things ONE FCKING BYTE AT A TIME with system calls for each byte should be retroactively aborted. Who the fck does idiotic things like that? How did they noty die as babies, considering that they were likely too stupid to find a tit to suck on?"

That's actually the funniest damn thing I've read in a while. Totally unprofessional and inappropriate for the context, but hilarious.

Maybe he needs a creative writing hobby of some sort as an outlet to help keep such glorious color out of his professional emails. (I'm totally serious and would email him the suggestion if I didn't think it a waste of time because I don't know the man, he doesn't know me, yadda.)

It would be great in a satire or fifty shades of grey: programming edition spinoff

Honestly it's a well-crafted insult, I give him that

If this werea Shakespeare play, it would be.

But in real life, we have to worry about being honest. And it's honestly not true that anyone who reads a byte at a time is too dumb to operate a nipple. All it means is that whoever did it doesn't know much about syscalls.

It will be remembered as well as Shakespeare play.

> should be retroactively aborted

> well-crafted insult

This is unnecessary vitriol directed at the person themselves as opposed to their code. It achieves nothing. He could get the same message across with far less words if he stuck to outlining the problem as opposed to attacking the creator of the problem.

Entertaining though in fairness. Often he’s saying what we’re thinking. That doesn’t make it right though and it’s ultimately self-defeating.

While I think reading in data one byte at a time is a stupid, I wouldn’t quite say that what he said is what I was thinking.

No but you know what I mean. We’ve all been there, looking at some effedup code and cursing the goon who dared check it in. Usually just end up sighing and getting on with it.

I suppose Linuses appeal in this regard is similar to Simon Cowell or Anne Robinson off the weakest link. Sometimes you just like to see stupid called out.

I am also a stupid programmer. However, the difference is that I try not to submit pull requests if I have no idea what I am doing. However, from what I am reading, these are not naive programmers who don't know what they're doing. From what I understand, most of the people that Linus rants about are employees of corporate sponsors of the Linux Foundation.

This is entirely my conjecture and I have no way of proving it but I suspect Linus taking a break is Intel flexing its muscles on the Linux Foundation.

From what I’ve read about some of these rants corporate sponsorship != competence and there’s one or two things in my recollection that were astoundingly stupid. Schoolboy errors, in code that’s supposed to run in kernel space. I get that he kind of feels that he shouldn’t be in a position of having to spoonfeed people.

Not condoning his rants, like I say it’s ultimately upon himself these reflect badly, and they probably do little to stem the flow of incompetence ...

> We’ve all been there, looking at some effedup code and cursing the goon who dared check it in.

Until you realize it was you who checked it in. If you write enough code, you will eventually not write the best code for some situation. It could be because you were tired or you simply didn't understand that part of the code well enough. Instead of attacking someone with insults, it's better to understand why the code got written and work to not have similar mistakes made in the future. Remember, everyone here is on the same team trying to make the best piece of software possible. Berating teammates (which is really what is happening here) does not make them better teammates or make the team as a whole better.

I completely agree up to the point scour ”everybody on the same team”

The most egregious errors made in my experience and often Linuses, are by people who don’t see themselves, or have no interest in being “part of the team”. Who dont abide by the code quality guidelines, who have been told time and again, or who are trying to make weasel changes to subvert the organisation of the code to their own ends.

Linuses way, however isn’t really the most productive approach, Aine these kinds of individuals don’t care anyway. It sounds as though this new “code of conduct” might be an attempt to move things forward.

> Often he's saying what we're thinking

This line of thinking is a fantastic way to create a non-inclusive group.

So what? Isn’t that what kernel development is all about? The careful detailed stuff goes in kernel space so that if you want to make a mess of things in your application you can do so without bringing down the whole system. It’s not like that to hurt your feelings or make you feel “excluded”. It’s for the greater good.

> careful detailed stuff

> if you want to make a mess of things in your application you can do so without bringing down the whole system

You don't need an exclusive community to make that work. We as an industry have tools: fuzzers, testing frameworks, better programming languages and type systems, and proof assistants, all of which will do a better, more consistent job of ensuring quality than project leads being assholes.

None of the techniques you’ve described is either proven or applicable to this domain. Being an asshole while unpleasant is not incompatible with “getting things done” as has been shown again and again and again.

I know a fellow who did that. He had never written a program before, read the manual, and wrote the code. He explained it in terms of the manual never said that system calls were slow.

This is somewhat ironic considering Linux is written in C, which is the most stubbornly "one thing at a time" language in widespread use today.

It's not ironic at all. C doesn't not do anything promoting a syscall per byte. Even if you think that's what you are doing, libc is probably buffering for you behind the scenes.

If you're using fopen(3) "stdio" (buffered I/O), then yeah, fread(3) and friends will buffer. But if you're using open(2) and read(2), libc's not going to buffer that.

For example?

- C-style strings are null-terminated, with no information about their length - no equivalent of "for item in items" or "map" because no native data type has any concept of its length - array-to-pointer decay

Modern assembly languages - for processors that have SIMD or AVX instructions - are more natively able to deal with several things at one time than C is.

Very true. I remember when one of the kernel maintainers announced why she was going to stop contributing, one of the reasons listed was "Linus has advocated physical abuse of kernel maintainers." Looking at the email that was given as evidence though, Linus told one of the maintainers something like "You're over 6 feet tall, if the contributors won't give you their patches in time to be merged, say you'll smash them :)" Hopefully Linus figures out a way to stop the over the top aggression while on break, but still keeps his no-nonsense attitude towards development.

Saying that "Linus has advocated physical abuse" based on that statement is completely disingenuous. It's an absurd interpretation. It was obviously humor and it wasn't insulting either.

There are several cases where Linus went way over the top with insults, but throwing him under the bus because of that statement is ridiculous.

That's the whole problem with these CoCs, if people get to apply the most uncharitable interpretation of any statement, we can't have anything but extremely formalized conversation, lest we run the risk of getting kicked out because someone who doesn't like us misrepresented our words.

There is a certain cost in time and energy required to separate yourself from harsh statements like that identify it as such. While it's pretty easy to say, yes he's not suggesting physical abuse, the statement implies this guy is not going to cut me any slack, I can expect to get verbally attacked for missing something in my code, etc.

Bad code has a cost associated with it as well, it takes time to reject it, explain why it's wrong, and deal with the frustration of someone less experienced. Unfortunately with some developers they want to push that off on the person writing the code and bear none of the burden.

I've seen the costs of the latter in open source projects I've worked on. People who feel encouraged stick around, support the community, and when given good feedback will often learn from it and submit better patches. Taking the time to communicate and make sure everyone feels included is part of the cost to get that.

> There is a certain cost in time and energy required to separate yourself from harsh statements like that identify it as such.

It's not a "harsh statement", it's a joke. If anything it's flattering of that person's stature.

> While it's pretty easy to say, yes he's not suggesting physical abuse, the statement implies this guy is not going to cut me any slack, I can expect to get verbally attacked for missing something in my code, etc.

I don't think it implies that, but that's besides my point. The remark was represented as "advocating physical intimidation and violence", which given the actual context is basically libel. You're free to interpret anything you want about the personality of Linus from him making such jokes, but misrepresenting it like that in public is dishonest and harmful to discourse itself.

My bad, I had misread the comment the poster made and didn't see that the quote was there. I stand corrected.

And to be perfectly anal, it was only advocating _threatening_ physical violence. (As in, _“say_ you'll smash them...”)

For an example of what you're talking about, it's what diplomats do. Where a careless word misinterpreted across different cultures and languages could start a war, diplomats have learned to be, er, "diplomatic".

Yeah, we should all be like career politicians and learn to say nothing with as many words as possible.

Eye for an eye leaves everyone blind

Here's a source for the actual quote:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/07/linus...

The preferred pronoun of that person is currently "they":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage_Sharp

You may want to edit your post accordingly.

>Everybody has a different conviction about what is abusive and what is not.

Correct. That means that you should, if possible, 1) try to communicate in a manner that most people won't consider abusive 2) adjust to the individual when needed. All of which Linus is saying he wasn't doing.