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Comment by dvt | Hacker News Reader

> You're contradicting yourself

How?

> you mention things that are very clearly not end products but thoughts and visions behind them that only lead to end products

Thoughts and visions are much more closely intertwined with end products (in fact, likely supercede them) than some random code review is, so I'm not seeing where the contradiction lies.

> that's the main thing he was being judged on for decades now

Linus hasn't written any code[1] in at least half a decade+. To argue that he's being judged on his code misunderstands why Linux became so popular to begin with.

[1] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/20/07/03/2133201/linus-torv...

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Either I'm bad at communicating today or you're bad at reading, because you're now using my points, so I'm not sure what to make out of it. Let me repeat myself then:

> Code review is (...) mostly about communication between people, convincing them to your ways of doing things (or getting convinced by others) and communicating needs. It's what keeps projects running and what makes people improve their skills.

The way he does that is exactly what most news stories about Torvalds have been focusing on for many years now. In practice, unless you run a project alone, code review is where thoughts and visions surface up the most. Or, well, should be - not everyone is good at it.

(that said, even though my point is that's he's obviously not being judged on his code, you can easily find code that he wrote as late as this month, so your statement is clearly wrong even if that doesn't really influence the discussion here - code review is still the vast majority of his job, just like he stated there under your link)

> Either I'm bad at communicating today or you're bad at reading

Could be both :)

The way I look at it is like this, and you could call this my thesis: I do not categorically think that code in itself is primarily relevant to us looking at a "software engineer" and saying "wow, she's good." The product (the Linux kernel, in Torvalds' case) is, on the other hand, what actually matters. I think we're getting caught up on the idea of a code review; a code review can serve many purposes, as a code review is basically just people talking about the code, the product, their feelings, and so on. Sure, sometimes it's like "this `i` should be a `j`", but other times it's "this should serve feature X, not feature Y."

Overall, I don't think Torvalds is judged by his code quality. And the snippet I cited is the man himself saying "I don't write code anymore" so I took that at face value, even though my conviction stands wether or not he actually does still write code. I don't think anyone actually cared that much about his code quality (maybe with the caveat that the kernel didn't crash).

PS: I could be totally wrong, and this is an interesting & stimulating conversation, regardless.

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