actually he is pragmatic pretty much anywhere Linux/programming. Pragmatically speaking, i'd gather all his emails, comments, etc... and made it a point for CS students to study it - not that it is 100% truth or one should agree with everything there, yet it is a coherent pragmatic system and the skills of building such should be studied and developed, like Golden Gate Bridge (vs. say Bay Bridge).
There's a certain concreteness in what you've describe as he's applied it to technology problems. Taking a step (or two) back and examining the system to notice commonalities or abstractions that can enable the current system. He did this with revision control and we have a general tool now embodied in git. He did this with fork and realized that all the attributes of processes could be selectively shared, not just the subset that fork provides, and now there's a much better, general tool, clone(2), that more constructs, forking and threading, can be implemented on top of without them being exceptions and special cases.
