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Comment by kagia | Hacker News Reader

I doubt everyone agrees to that coding style, I certainly don't. However when submitting code to a project I'd still stick to the prescribed coding style, because I believe consistency in any code base can be just as important as any other measure of readability.

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I find it hard to agree with a lot of this, but it'd obviously be someone who's written a lot of code, thought a lot about how to write code, and reads a lot of code - even if we didn't know who it was. There's a lot to learn from reading stuff like this, if you take it all with a grain of salt... or if you're contributing.

This. It's easier to find lots of people who don't agree with a particular style (I agree with none but mine which is far, far away from the kernel one's for instance and much more readable of course, lol) than people who do, but worse is projects where styles are mixed. Or even tabs and spaces are mixed. Don't get started on that one :] (edit already happened in other comments, of course)

I think it was written by Torvalds and other kernel hackers. It is part of the Linux source code, under the Documentation directory.

Initial commit was by Linus[0], but it looks like most of the other commits[1] have been small amends by other people (apart from a couple of new chapters)

[0] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

[1] https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux....

That "initial commit" was the import of the whole kernel tree into git, ignoring any previous history; that commit having been made by Linus does not mean any particular file was written by Linus.

You should instead look into historical repositories like https://archive.org/details/git-history-of-linux, which go further back; however, before Bitkeeper the authorship of each change was not tracked in detail (that historical repository IIRC does not have the detailed Bitkeeper history, but there is another repository somewhere which has it).

Interesting, thanks for the link.

If I recall correctly, it was written by Linus Torvalds a long time ago. I haven't found yet when it originally appeared, but it was probably the pre-Bitkeeper days; I found a discussion about it dated from the last century.

There were many edits to it, by several people; its more recent story can be seen on the kernel git repository. Of course, if Linus disagreed with an edit, it wouldn't go in, so in a way it's still his document.

And it's more or less a codification of K&R style.

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