Linux Torvalds: Every developer thinks that their code is so special and magical | Hacker News Reader

Linux Torvalds: Every developer thinks that their code is so special and magical

git.kernel.org

20 pointsekianjo29 comments

It's easy to call Linus a bully, abrasive what not... But I think a lot of people in his position, who get huge amount of code to review, and some of it pretty horrible would handle this even worse.

Also I think this is his way of filtering people that can't cope with him. If you are strong-willed enough you will go over what he said and try to make your code better otherwise you will just leave. Anyway he did not lose anything in his opinion.

I fully support his style of communication and think everyone should be able to choose how to lead their personal projects. If you don't agree with the community nobody is forcing you to join it. Not everything in life has to be nice towards you. Some stuff you remember better if it hurts.

It would be difficult to determine if his style has been an overall net benefit or net deficit though. Certainly things worked out well, but would they have worked out better if he took a different approach?

One thing for sure is that nobody complaining made it better. RMS has his differences from Linus but isn't like these small issues. Linus is just straightforward.

>One thing for sure is that nobody complaining made it better

Talented people, that made concrete contributions, have left because they didn't want to deal with him. One example: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/linix_kernel_dev_wh...

Wouldnt the opposite be true as well?

I can imagine some one staying away from certain ecosystems because they are too nice to inconpetence. For example, say, how pythons standard JSON library intentionally and likely well intended, breaks the the standard and causes hours of debugging nightmare.

In a less friendly world this wouldnt fly and if i need something that actually works ill have a strong bias for the products of the "mean people"

Linux is not his personal project at all. Just check out the copyright lines.

"Every developer"... that's a bold statement.

I don't think my code is so special or magical, maybe specially bad and magically bad...

Also I believe his name is Linus, not Linux ^_^

I like hiding my code and hoping no one ever sees it and points out how bad it is.

I prefer code reviews of my code ^_^

In the real world, yes. I was trying to be funny.

I do prefer when the team/company at least starts with a decent set of coding standards for everyone to follow. Especially on projects with dozens or hundreds of devs touching things. It seems companies realize the benefits of that often after it becomes a problem.

Maybe he doesn't consider people with such mindsets a developer :) ?

He just considers people developers if they think their code is special and magical? haha

I am very critical of my code and think it is pretty crap and can always improve.

I respect Linus' work but other than that I don't care about his opinions as he is a bully.

I mean, I get it, but is that necessary? To me, it takes significantly less effort to say "X processor is not popular enough at this time to have this driver enabled by default. If this changes in the future, we can reevaluate, however I don't anticipate this changing any time soon." If he gets enough of these that it warrants this kind of response, maybe have an official policy on what can be enabled default and the reasoning behind it.

I think he is playing too nice, delaying the offending module's inclusion for a few months can be a better choice - it is a community maintained big project affecting hundreds of millions of devices, all parties should play nice, no one should sneak in anything surprising just for the benefit of your code/project/company.

This reminds me a similar incident that wasted me lots of time -

AMD Ryzen + Gigabytes motherboard does not boot on recent Ubuntu versions because the old buggy AMD GPIO module is enabled in Ubuntu by default. You might think "hmm, they might need that GPIO module to control some other hardware". Well - that module is only required when you have a AMD laptop touch pad, sadly, as of writing there is no AMD Ryzen laptop, period. All other distributions do not have the same issue - they don't enable it by default.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1671360

Enabling the very cute Cavium security processor (which will never ever be popular) by default in the linux kernel to potentially impact everyone? That is just plain stupidity demonstrated in a whole new level.

Everyone should be happy for the fact that Linus is doing what he can to avoid such stupidities to be repeated in the future.

I don't think anyone here is arguing the outcome, just the approach.

Indeed, see my other comment, Linus is too nice to such company trying to sneak in this unwanted surprise purely for the benefit of their "security processor".

>trying to sneak in

That's really the point. Assuming malice, and reacting in kind. It's quite possible no malice was involved here.

Only when I came to the comment session, did I realize the problem. Linus is from Finland and, I guess, that is an important thing to remember. He is from a non-American (that is U.S.A.) cultural background, where this kind of remark is not viewed as rude, by some even as a form of humor. I am from the Netherland myself and have worked together with people from Finland.

guess that explains a lot... thought this was 100% sarcasm

He's right, else we wouldn't bother coding it to begin with.

Ah that is true, when I started programming I had a lot more of attachment to my code than now because it was so special and magic.

Nowadays I do realize most code (including mine) is expendable; it should be thrown under the bus when no need of it and partly rewritten to improve it; but that perfect code never gets shipped. Just try to make something that works, then improve it so it's not painful to use it but that's it.

I still do not agree with the tone, but again I am not Linus nor in his shoes.

This isn't matching my experience at all. Unless we're talking about junior programmers, most of who do think this way. Once their magical code breaks in spectacular ways once or twice, the smarter ones will realize their code is just as crappy as everyone else's.

Cute (and harmless) example of "projection" in psychology

Linus does not say "every developer except me", he says "every developer". I read a lot of self-deprecation in that comment.

Ad hominem by Linus here. He could have quite well made his point without referring to the author at all by just saying that uncommon devices should not be marked as m.

I agree. I can support his tirades when it's warranted, but this is a bit over the top.

I am sorry, I must be missing something, where is he referring to the author?

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