Come on man. This is such low effort appealing to Theo's public image. If this is something you feel you must describe as a personal attack, it must be hard to get around in life.

I find this response quite level headed and I like that some of his responses make it to the front page that provide insights into why such language changes are more difficult than they seem.

I believe that Linus's attacks are usually good intentioned, to get people in the Linux community to act better. I am not sure what Theo's intent is.

If you want to effect change, do some work, don't write emails.

As can be expected from a project with a slogan of "Shut up and hack"[1].

[1] https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#51b

As the notes indicate, this saying goes back much further than this release song.

If I say "You have a big nose, it makes you ugly" as the first line in my email, it may well be a "statement of fact" and yet still be a personal attack. Your implication that a statement of fact cannot be a personal attack is untrue.

Whether the OP has or has not written Posix utilities in rust is of no relevance to the actual argument whatsoever, it is just a way to have a dig at the OP.

The second part of your example is a statement of opinion, not fact -- so it's not really the same thing at all.

His argument doesn't change if you change it to

>You have a big nose, it makes you ugly to me.

And that is a statement of fact.