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Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

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11–20 of 246 posts

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#12
post #7

This is sad, not so much because of the lack of code coming from this world class programmer, but because coding is such fun, and Torvalds isn't having fun programming, else he'd be doing it. I'm closing in on forty years of coding and still get a kick out of it. I'd still be doing it if I weren't getting paid for it. But my skills are at best, uh, modest compared to Linus. I'd think that doing a thing so much better…

Technical leaders often get promoted away from their core skills into managerial or administrative type roles. This ones sounds like a gate keeping role

This is not what happened here.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#13
post #7

This is sad, not so much because of the lack of code coming from this world class programmer, but because coding is such fun, and Torvalds isn't having fun programming, else he'd be doing it. I'm closing in on forty years of coding and still get a kick out of it. I'd still be doing it if I weren't getting paid for it. But my skills are at best, uh, modest compared to Linus. I'd think that doing a thing so much better…

I didn’t see where he said that he doesn’t enjoy it any more. To me it sounds like his lack of coding is more out of necessity.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#14

Website will not let me edit with the back button on safari, had to close the tab to escape. Why do so many sites do that?

I can confirm: if you try to back out, you are presented with a blue bar at the top saying something like "before you leave..."

https://imgur.com/a/93wjGED

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#15
post #7

This is sad, not so much because of the lack of code coming from this world class programmer, but because coding is such fun, and Torvalds isn't having fun programming, else he'd be doing it. I'm closing in on forty years of coding and still get a kick out of it. I'd still be doing it if I weren't getting paid for it. But my skills are at best, uh, modest compared to Linus. I'd think that doing a thing so much better…

Coding is fun but for me collaborative development has stopped being fun. People can be rude, biased, and it seems there is always someone with 50 questions or a concern who sucks the life right out of it.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#16

> So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Why commit messages rather than code comments?

When bisecting to find the cause of a bug it's usually important to me to understand why a change was made. That's sometimes hard to describe in a comment (especially if you're removing lines). The commit message should tell me the why of the change, and link to background information like email threads and the bug tracker. That's the why of the change, the why of the code itself can go in a comment.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#17

Website will not let me edit with the back button on safari, had to close the tab to escape. Why do so many sites do that?

Yeah you have to hold the back button in safari and choose the last page of you don’t open in a new window. I hate sites that jack your back button like that. Normally they end up blocked in my Pi-hole. Reason they do that: bad coders using cut and paste code or a framework they don’t understand and think it will help users navigate their site easier. Had a teacher go off on how this practice should be illegal like un-closable pop ups.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#18
I'm an academic (post-doc) and while I am about to transition, I've never really worked hard to get an actual tenure track position because honestly I don't want to become a grant writer who does so little actual scientific work, in all honesty. I might have to for my future's stability sake but I've been loathe to. I want to do science, not academia.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technical leaders often get promoted away from their core skills into managerial or administrative type roles. This ones sounds like a gate keeping role

This is not what happened here.

How is that not what happened? Torvalds wrote code, and now he manages other people writing code. He's not a people-manager; he is at least still in a technical role, but he's not a dev anymore.

Re: Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

#20

> So commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself. Why commit messages rather than code comments?

Code comments should explain why a particular piece of code is doing what it's doing right now, and what the expected behavior should be right now. Code should be written so that comments are not necessary at all, but sometimes it's unavoidable.

Now, why a particular piece of code came to be, why the code should have this expected behavior, why something is being added or removed or changed, may be unrelated (or unnecessary) to what this particular code is doing.

So there's two kinds of documentation here: 1) "this is what this code does", 2) "here are the series of events that led to this code". You need the former when you are editing code. You need the latter when you are reviewing code for merge, as well as in the future to figure out how the f*!$ this code came to be (which is useful to avoid re-running into a bug, troubleshooting/understanding a legacy system, or removing important code). The latter may also immediately become obsolete the second time the same block of code is edited, so we keep this historic information in e-mail or code commit messages.

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