As a young coder, I remember reading these linus oldtime posts as an exhilarating breath of fresh air. Everyone around me was all-in about "object orientation" and similar bullshit. When I say everyone I mean it: there was not a single person that suggested even a hint of hypothetical disagreement on software engineering mantra. Thus, it was refreshing to read these posts and realize that there existed, after all, another side of the coin.
We should not be afraid that young and impressionable people see "all sides of the coin". We should be afraid that they only get to see one side.
Somehow, the Go language is doing it, eschewing traditional OOP in favor of a get shit done fast and a little dirty approach. It's not even because of the charm of an individual either.
Then again, before Go there was JS as the big opponent to rigid OOP. I still don't understand why they felt like they had to add half-baked classes / OOP to it.
Keeping data and functions together can be nice. In some rare cases inheritance is almost OK. But still don't understand how it all went nuts and they started writing, say, parsers in that style...
But it's always nice to hear that there are other people having similar opinions. Especially if it's people like Linus.
Bit of a blanket statement. I enjoy it much more than the little Node I investigated for work.
The lack of functional programming though, yeah. I feel like it might be due to GC optimisations as well, however. From what I understand, the reason the GC is so fast is because such a style of programming is heavily discouraged.
I'm another one that prefers putting a bullet on my foot than putting it on my head.
That one I'll never forgive :-)
I'd say we should. For me his apologizing was more cringe worthy than anything in these emails.
Basically caving in to the American (and some Europeans by mimicry) culture of and "shame! shame! shame!"-style demand for public apologies.
We need more people standing up to what they see as BS in tech. And if the use strong language doing it, that's in a great tradition too.
>Are people - especially young and impressionable developers - able to separate the two sides of the coin, or does it serve to plant a seed of normalisation for this kind of communication?
Yeah, as if we suffer from too much candor and strong words in today's tech landscape.
It's more colorful. It drives the point harder.
It's also more healthy and the evolutionary smart thing to do:
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/science-swearing...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/science-sweari...
https://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/swearing-is-surprisingly-go...
https://www.sciencealert.com/people-who-swearing-cursing-rud...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/27/smarter-living/the-case-f...
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205...
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/science-swearing...
Fuck yeah!
From social change (e.g. "look at these backwards bigots"), to running a tight crew ("wtf Kowalski, you stupid! You nearly got us all killed"), deriding others can just as well have positive effects.
Then there's the fact that some things naturally and inevitable deserve derision.
Not all ideas are derision proof.
Let's have Theranos or Fyre festival or non-vaccination as an example that we all agree on.
A healthy society should include a healthy dose of derision for derision worthy ideas.
(And if you think my argument above is stupid and deserves derision, then you've just made my point!)
>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?
Surely there are better ways to express a point without going at great length attempting to offend someone else. If you believe this sort of abusive attitude is acceptable, then why shouldn't people provide feedback with their fists as well? It can carry a similar degree of persuasion.
What if the purpose is to discourage the people making those mistakes from contributing to the project?
And let us also gently place everyone's thumbs into their mouths while they are asleep because it feels cute and cuddly.
I would not accept shit from people just because they have some authority in some place.
I just read it and it seems pretty tame to me. It's direct but if people get offended by this these days, by gods, we have a problem. Sometimes growing a thicker skin is the answer, one can't put the burden all on the messenger.
I mean, there's some Linus e-mails (and also Erik Naggum posts on Usenet) that I thought were awesome when I was young and impressionable but that I now think are over the line. But this specific example, if that's not possible... phew.)
(I also get the impression some commenters here do not realize what "fsck" refers to.)
Some people are offended by this other side of his style, yes. TBH, I don't understand why was it such a big deal. He never spoke about non-technical things in that way. Meanwhile, his technical opinions always were clear, sound and to the point.
> This is a much better email. It has 43% as many words, but loses none of the meaning. It's still forceful and unambiguous. With fewer words, it's easier for someone to absorb the core message about unthinking deference to standards.
> It also doesn't berate anyone, building a needlessly antagonistic culture around the project. Writing this email instead of the original email doesn't require any extra work, and will save mileage on Linus' (or your) fingers besides.
Author commentary: https://twitter.com/garybernhardt/status/1009844030656561153...
> If you read apologists commenting about this email, they often completely miss Linus' actual point. He's fine with the change; he doesn't like the justification, which uses an appeal to authority. The very people who apologize for the useless bloat miss this because of the bloat!
> These people missed the signal because it was buried in noise. But most of them go on to argue that the noise is boosting the signal; that ranting is good because it drives the point home. But they didn't even detect the signal because they were so focused on defending the noise!
Well, they know there are hundreds of millions of others who use their work, thousands who worked with them, and a trillion dollar industry built on their labor and effort, and that they have spoken their mind, with no BS, and no fake niceties like it's the norm.
I guess they can always take comfort in that.
Others don't want certain kinds of people to "want to talk to them" in the first place, so they are non-polite towards their kind on purpose.
And a final similar case is wanting people to talk to you only if they can stand that level of discussion/no BS talk/bluntness/sense of humor/profanity/etc. So that you can be yourself among them, and they can be themselves with you, with no facades.
I, for one, pretty much prefer being spoken to that way, instead of a sanitized corporate newspeak that means exactly the same thing but uses "professional" words.
I think people mean well when they talk about empathy and kindness, but those concepts assume that the only reality is how we feel and speak about things, when generally it's the underlying reality that is painful or harsh. And when you have to deliver a product, you can't avoid that reality.
I try to address it by frequently talking about my own fuckups and thus making it easier for junior devs to understand that failing is something we all go through.
But nothing can change the fact that it hurts to invest deeply in something and see it fail. We can't make pain go away, so it's better to just get it over with and learn to adapt to it and be resilient.
As a younger developer - what matters to me most is the constructive criticism. I don't want to have it phrased nicer(nor harsher) than needed - i just want it to be down to earth and constructive.
Personally i think when projects grow, there is a point after which you cant really reason that much about what is going on, just have to debug it.
Are people - especially young and impressionable developers - able to separate the two sides of the coin, or does it serve to plant a seed of normalisation for this kind of communication?