Good
There are a lot of rude people, people who answer in several ridiculous ways, etc.
Linus answers may be rough, but it's usually a clear answer, and well founded. There's a lot of worse behaviour out there (especially in subsystems)
There are a lot of rude people, people who answer in several ridiculous ways, etc.
Linus answers may be rough, but it's usually a clear answer, and well founded. There's a lot of worse behaviour out there (especially in subsystems)
Linus' "rants" are fairly infrequent in reality, and are never targeted at random people in the Kernel community -- always someone who has been in a senior position for a long while and ought to be behaving more appropriately.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2012/7/6/495
You never know when it hits you.
What I'm not fine with:
"This is crap" (without pointing why or how to fix it - of course with ruder words)
"We're not applying this fix" (without any explanation why and the system is pretty much broken/only works for limited cases/bug waiting to happen/etc)
"What are you talking about?"/patronizing behaviour (when it's crystal clear what you mean)
And usually the ones with thinner skin are the ones who try to push fundamentally bad things.
I'm puzzled by how someone can miss that, but of course this is HN and some people take everything literally.
I have my pet theory that getting outraged about random things like that is not genuine, but just signalling. You can see a lot of this kind of behaviour among the social justice movement.
Sadly the web has made it all too easy to take something out of its context.
I think part of the problem with Linus' style is that people will inevitably try and imitate him. Not many will manage the intelligence and coding skills, but pretty much everyone can be a jerk if they put their mind to it.
I suppose you can say it's not his fault if people do that, but perhaps with a bit more kindness (to people, not to their bad ideas), the world would be a better place.
You're of course free to find that offensive, but if you think he's genuinely questioning whether or not another human being should be allowed to live or survive, you don't understand the message.
EDIT: It's also a point that likely stems from longstanding frustration. The amount of userspace software that does stupid amounts of system calls because people still do not realise how expensive system calls are is astounding. My favourite high profile pet peeve with this used to be the MySQL client library (don't know if it's been fixed) that used to do an astounding number of tiny read()'s which could have been cut to a tiny fraction with some basic user-space buffering. You can often find substantial bottlenecks in applications in about 10 seconds by attaching strace and look for stupid amounts of syscalls.
Many insults are not meant literally.
Incidentally, this kind of incidents might slow down progress in the long term.
update: by this kind of incidents i mean him being an asshole, not people telling on him. update 2: i don't endorse his behaviour.
I think censoring people like Linus when they are clearly using hyperbole or other figures of speech is rude and immoral.
Now what do we do?
Even if we're making this "the only thing that matters is how great the code is" argument, there are good arguments against allowing people to be hostile.
You never know whether the size of your developer community could be larger. If you're turning 10 expert but conflict-averse developers away for every one asshole genius, it is unlikely that your code output/quality is being maximized.
There's no shortage of people -- even people who are paid to hack on the kernel every day! -- who say that they refuse to engage with the upstream community due to the hostility they expect to receive or have received.
There's also the question of if the people to whom you refer would change their behavior if the item they point to was removed. As we all know, what people say they will do and what people actually do often diverge.
I don't think Linus or Theo are inherently dicks. They actually seem to be awfully nice guys for the most part. Unfortunately, we seem to have a generation of people that cannot take the hint that their code needs work or they just don't seem to pay attention to what is going on. I'm not sure if its a symptom of rapidly developing code and then fixing it later. Most BDFLs are under stress and need to set clear boundaries. It seems like people only pay attention to the bombastic and not the subtle.
I personally disagree with this definition; for me "end justifies the means" sounds like a perfectly rational conclusion, but not for humans - it's too common a failure mode for a man to follow this maxim, and it almost always ends bad; hence we have that saying.
> Unfortunately, we seem to have a generation of people that cannot take the hint that their code needs work or they just don't seem to pay attention to what is going on.
I agree. Moreover, I think we have a generation of people who like to take offense at anything and everything, mostly for signalling reasons. "I am offended by what you wrote, therefore I am a better person and you are wrong".
I have never heard a person use that phrase and not violate the rights of other humans and their own morality. It is the gateway phrase people use to justify some act that they admit, by using that phrase, is not honorable. It's the phrase you say right before walking on that road paved with all those good intentions.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/uv/ends_dont_justify_means_among_hum...
This post elaborates on the topic a bit more, and after reading it some time ago I ended up agreeing with its conclusion - that the phrase is OK from theoretical standpoint, for perfectly rational actors, but not for humans - hence the heuristic, "end does not justify the means".
A community that is all those things is of immense social value to those who feel accepted as a result, but warm fuzzies aren't the same as working software.