In the top 10 as well. In fact not too long ago I was asking someone to rate some piece of code and used 'from Linus / Carmack to (something shitty I don't remember)' as the metric.

It would be fun to make a game that showed you random code snippets and asked you to identify the author.

I honestly have no idea how good Linus is as a programmer; he's proven his worth as a project manager, he seems to know a thing or two (to make an understatement) about operating systems, but I don't know if he's a good programmer.

Empathy is a trait that I value highly on a programmer.

Empathy and faux politeness are different things.

I'm not disagreeing. In fact I would say that faux politeness is a strong sign of low empathy.

On this particular case, Linus has publicly admitted that he struggles with empathy.

It's tough to decide if the Linux kernel or git is his bigger contribution to society.

Git isn't even the best DVCS, it won on the back of github more than it's own strengths.