> When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. E.g.
> "That is an idiotic thing to say; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 +
> 1 is 2, not 3."
It's actually more "direct and to the point" to not call someone an idiot, a moron etc. Some other justification for his "brusqueness" is needed, perhaps being opinionated rather than accommodating; another instance of being blunt/pragmatic not precise/academic; a signal of willingness to defend his values for how to run linux (I've seen productive communities fail due to lack of this leadership); demonizing a common enemy to unite your side (e.g. Microsoft, Oracle).
It seems logical to me that abuse isn't necessary; but logic is a poor substitute for actual understanding.
And I will take that, if coupled with demonstrated competence and a solid, sensible vision, over being "nice", "accomodating" and "willing to answer questions", every time.
This attitude is not true of all OS developers, though. There are lots who are really even-tempered. But they are also very focused and not necessarily willing to accomodate everyone with a "bright idea".
While it might make the learning curve a bit steeper for mere mortals, I actually believe this is what makes a better OS.
I would be interested to see a "Linux" where Torvalds also controlled the userland. What would it be like?
anti-humor mode: It's terse, but not necessarily to the point. Things like "| awk '{print $1}'" or "find . -exec sh -c 'fds' \;" or ""$(echo "$x" | sed 's/a/b/')""
are a lot of characters for their respective purposes; a modern shell adhering to similar principles could do better.
I was tempted to say something similar. But this is a thread about Linus.
As for your use of find, I rarely ever use find for anything more than printing a recursive dir listing. I always gravitate toward different approaches for doing the other things it can do. Syntax is probably one of the reasons. I'm just not motivated to learn find's idiosyncratic syntax. Why not just make find use C-like syntax as does awk? If I was to redesign UNIX, every utility would, where possible, use a C-like syntax. Because then the user would naturally be learning a little bit about C right from the start.
Have you ever tried the k language?
If you like terse, it is a pleasure to use.
Generally, I like sed as an example of a terse, compact language (and sed seems a logical extension of ed, not something wildly and arbitrarily different), except when it's necessary to use -e to separate commands. Being able to use semicolons to separate commands allows more density.
I have always posited the verbosity (and the complexity) of the shell comes from the need for quoting and escaping. If you could avoid those two necessities, the command line could be more concise, and readable.
I don't like C-like syntax in Unix tools, as the shell isn't C-like, and it's not clear that it's possible to make it C-like without sacrificing writing speed (lots of parentheses are hard to wrangle interactively); and awk is nice and efficient for some things the shell can't easily do, but it's its own world with a different set of variables and overlapping functionality, and you can't easily stick a pipe in the middle of an awk program. My ideal redesign would take the shell, make the syntax for iteration, pattern matching, arrays, etc. much simpler (integrating the functionality of awk), and (most importantly?) unify the ways various commands expect to receive data and take arguments representing parts of that data (fields, lines)... while still being the shell.
Dunno about sed - once I wrote a Brainfuck interpreter in it for fun, but I see it as a Turing tarpit - for things more complicated than "/a/s/a/b/" I prefer awk, though I wish awk had the succinct "s/a/b/", and I wish either of them had a quick way to extract a capture group from a match. (vi was a teenager when I was born, so I personally don't care about adhering to ed.)
I've never tried any APL-like languages and am therefore somewhat scared of them... but most of the programs I write outside of the interactive shell are non-throwaway and/or the kind of glue code that uses lots of random system functions, which decreases the value of extreme terseness. (But I prefer anything over Java and dislike the inflexibility of languages without macros, so perhaps it's only logical for me to go ahead and learn an array language.)
I too write mostly throwaway stuff. Obviously, terse languages are better suited for that than others.
Java makes me cringe. But my understanding is Java programmers use IDE's with autocomplete. They don't do much typing.
As for your pipe comment, are you a whiz with passing file descriptors? What do you think about chaining programs together in this way? Would that solve your pipe needs?
Maybe you could accomplish what you want using lex? The general paradigm is pattern-action, just like awk. Lots of flexibility in what you can create. You could create your own interpreter.
I like writing simple filters. I guess I have succombed to the UNIX voodoo. I think of everything as a stream of text.
I'd be interested to take a crack at your "capture group" problem, if you can give me an example of what it looks like.
There are many ways to do this (gawk sorta supports it, perl can do it easily enough with
perl -pe 'print "$1\n" if /the number is ([0-9]+)/'
but it's a bit cumbersome), but it would be much nicer if awk directly supported it.
Not sure what you mean about lex; if I decide to go ahead and write my ideal shell I could use it, but that's A Project, a large part of which is designing the syntax and deciding what commands to implement. And I'm lazy. :)
Can you give an example of some sample input and how you want the output to look? I'm stupid and this is the only way I can be sure I know what you're trying to do.
From the little I do know about Linus, I think it's less pomp and more a mix of some ratio between his style of playful, tongue-in-cheek impishness and anger depending on what kind of day he's having. He's a pretty nice fellow for the most part.
He's also constantly inundated with arguments/accusations/requests from idiots. If you ever read through some of his Linux newsletter arguments, you can see why he'd develop a take-no-prisoners style of communicating.
For linus the github 'discussion' was an everyday thing. He speaks his mind and will apologise if he is wrong, such is the order of the day on the kernel mailing list.
He could take the killfile approach to lkml... of course that would get him just as much hate. It's really a lose-lose situation, no good way of getting people to stop with the "im right and won't stop pestering you even though it's your project" stuff without pissing off one half of the internet or the other.
The oddest thing is, as I read random lkml threads that interest me, it seems that Linus isn't a jerk immediately when people bring up stuff - even well hashed stuff. When he is wrong, he admits it, and seems reasonable about patches that aren't perfect/up to snuff, particularly from newer devs who are trying to do well. It's when the threads go on and on that it seems to degrade. (or when a topic that is famous for being a no-go is brought up... but i think it's fair to at least understand the thing you are trying to contribute to, particularly as well documented as linux).
In England when you say "Hello! How are you?" the answer is almost always "Very well thanks, how about you?", even if the person is not very well. This is considered polite. Other countries find this odd, and consider it lying.
I remember going in for a surgical procedure a few years back and just before the operation a non-British doctor told me "This is really going to hurt" - I was expecting "There may be some slight discomfort", which is the usual British way of saying "This is REALLY going to hurt".
I was quite concerned (i.e. British for "terrified") until they gave me the pre-med Valium.
Read his family blog, or even better emails on the Linux kernel mailing list, since he's sent quite a lot over the years. Apart from when he calls out someone for being stupid and ugly, he sounds very nice. You'll find many instances where he sounds neither pompous nor mean.
I wouldn't call it 'projection' necessarily. Linus Torvalds can seem like a pompous jackass sometimes, it's true. But it's useful to keep in mind the context of this comment of his. Linus is a guy who spent many, many years fighting an unusually and unnecessarily difficult battle to prevent something he created from being coopted and stolen by a copyright troll, SCO. So this is somewhat personal for him.
He speaks very reasonably, it's just his writing style. I think he's one of those people who's choice of written word does not always convey the tone they would have conveyed in person.
And, to be fair, he does intentionally say things in an over-the-top way to be funny, although such statements pretty much always have an element of truth.
Good point. I took a course on business communication, and remember learning that tone is often lost in writing. You may send an email to someone in a friendly, playful mood, but it can come across as sarcastic and/or rude to the recipient.
Of course he would, he's in person. It's easier to be mean on the internet than in person. Not to mention no one has perfected punching someone through the internet.
I can accept one's arrogance and lack of social grace being proportional to their contribution. So Linus in my book can be a total jackass and it would probably still be ok.
In reality I think he is just direct and says exactly what he means.
