I've read Torvalds' post at the top of the page. I've also read the balance of opinion on this page. The majority view is that C++ really is a terrible language for writing a kernel. Fine, I accept that.
Now re-read Torvalds' post. How many people here would want to work with someone who regularly expresses himself like that? I know, I know; substance is more important than image and so forth. But that post reminds me of what people said working with Steve Jobs was like before he died.
You are 100% right about not wasting one's time with jerks. But I disagree that Linus regularly expresses himself like one. Really: open lkml.org and search for his posts. Most of the time, he's an ordinary project maintainer.
Sometimes, he's quite the opposite of a jerk [1]:
WARNING! I wasn't kidding when I said that I've done this by reading
gtk2 tutorials as I've gone along. If somebody is more comfortable with
gtk, feel free to send me (signed-off) patches.
Just as an example of the extreme hackiness of the code, I don't even
bother connecting a signal for the "somebody edited the dive info"
cases. I just save/restore the dive info every single time you switch
dives. Christ! That's truly lame.
One must remember that his role as maintainer of linux requires him to have ultimate, non-ambiguous opinion about a lot of stuff. He's the judge of what effectively goes into the "official" kernel tree. Moreover, most of the kernel contributors don't deal with him directly — git is the materialization of that modus operandi.
When he does express himself like that, however, it becomes news. He always has a reason, though. In this case:
Please don't talk about portability, it's BS.
Is this how normal people start a conversation? Who's the jerk, here?
Except it's not true: The Commodore Amiga delivered multi-tasking, shared objects and sophisticated IPC in only 256k of main memory. They cite OO techniques as being key.
I've read Torvalds' post at the top of the page. I've also read the balance of opinion on this page. The majority view is that C++ really is a terrible language for writing a kernel. Fine, I accept that.
Now re-read Torvalds' post. How many people here would want to work with someone who regularly expresses himself like that? I know, I know; substance is more important than image and so forth. But that post reminds me of what people said working with Steve Jobs was like before he died.
Life is too short to work with jerks.
EDIT: Removed excess snark.