101–110 of 221 posts
If US-Americans could just for a moment stop trying to impose their "culture" on everyone else, that would be nice. Oh, right, they can't.
Perhaps you could elaborate on how this is even relevant.
It only ever seems to be an issue for those entitled, self-absorbed Title IX crybabies for whom every opinion they disagree with is "literally rape". :-)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. Can you explain how this particular code is "safe" or "unsafe"? Again: I'm curious as to how much of what Linus says is taken at face value on HN. I'm even more interested now, because the fulcrum of Linus's argument isn't safety.
You are committing a logical fallacy. I'm not "the voice of HN", nor am I a representative sample of "what HN thinks". This is just my opinion. Using a builtin operation ("addition and comparison of integers") is always safer than using a function that may or may not work the same everywhere. I.e. a nonstandard function. Also, the proposed code has more levels of indirection, therefore places a higher cognitive load…
Returning to the thread: why are you so comfortable extrapolating from Linus's rant to "this code would ruin the Linux kernel"? You don't grok the code he's talking about.
Is it because "if Linus is arguing against this code with this much ferocity, the code must be really bad?" Because if that's it, you're starting to see the issue some people have with the tone he uses.
If US-Americans could just for a moment stop trying to impose their "culture" on everyone else, that would be nice. Oh, right, they can't.
Or perhaps everyone can learn to communicate in a clear and concise manner? Just an idea.
Funny how the author "will moderate comments" and the only comments left are those who uncritically agree with them.
I see at least two comments that are critical of the author. And even if they were posted after you wrote this, how do you know he has deleted anything at all?
Can anyone defend Linus' version as better communication than Eisenberg's?
Nobody will try to pull that shit again for quite some time. The "Constructive" version will be handwaved by submitting the same code again and giving literally any deflecting excuse like "You're just afraid of using new technology like this function.
Did you read the thread? The programmer who wrote the original patch is arguing with him, just as he would have had Linus' reply been polite. I seems that vitriol does not have the power you think it does.
I am troubled by this obsession that these activists have with Torvalds. Could there be anything more minor than these complaints about tone? What harm does the existence of one software project which permits 'rants' do to others? Do those who claim to desire civility not understand that by hounding and inundating him and the community in general with the same talking points ad infinitum, they are themselves being un…
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond#i_am_slowly_goi...
Rational Wiki certainly has its own biases, but they call out a lot of problematic items with links right back to the blog posts if you care to verify.
Linus doesn't deserve to be in his position. Technical merit doesn't excuse being a horrible manager of people.
i read this response by linus and it doesn't seem to be abusive to anyone, he's being critical of the code. who is this linus guy anyway? he sounds like a typical new yorker.
>who is this linus guy anyway? lol. just the guy who wrote linux and git. He's a fin btw.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Linus doesn't deserve to be in his position. What exactly do you mean by "in his position"? It's his project that he started years ago. His participation is likened to a monarchy, not a democracy. His further involvement is, therefore, not something that can be decided by an election. He doesn't deserve to be in his position with respect to a project he started and owns? That doesn't make any damn sense.
Or maybe since he can't communicate without expletives or being overly coarse he can appoint someone else to the task of explaining the problems with code contributions?
Should he end all his messages with "Long live our dear leader Kim Jong-Un" to not offend North-Koreans?
http://catcode.com/comments/2015/cf20151101.html
Compared to the actual rant, it's deficient in explaining Linus's viewpoint in multiple ways:
- The phrases "The problem as I see it" and "I think", which I imagine Eisenburg added in an attempt to avoid jumping to conclusions or avoid making it personal or whatever, to me come off as hesitant or unsure. There is an authoritative rejection of the patch itself at the end, but still the revised post sounds like Linus is inviting people to post their opinions over whether the code is actually problematic or not. By contrast, the original post makes it clear that he is highly convinced that the code is bad and will need extremely persuasive evidence to change his mind. Now, you could say that it's rarely productive to solve problems by shutting down debate, and that he should invite opinions - but in truth, Linus probably would at least consider a sufficiently rigorous and detailed counterargument, and him clearly expressing the force of his opinion gives other people a signal that they should take the time to write such an argument, rather than being more brief (because they think Linus is hesitant and that that is sufficient), and then being promptly overruled, even if, given the chance, they could have persuaded him.
You might not see Eisenburg's version as hesitant yourself, but that's precisely the point - all language is ambiguous, but using reserved language errs on the side of having people think your opinion weaker than it is, while harsh language is the opposite.
Of course, the flipside is that someone who doesn't know Linus's history might well conclude that he's so angry as to be beyond reason, discouraging detailed rebuttals for the opposite reason. In fact, I think that is likely to happen in this case, and that therefore his post went too far - just because I am defending harsh language in general doesn't mean I agree exactly with his tone choices. There are certainly potential midpoints between the actual rant and Eisenburg's version that would clearly establish his position without being quite so mean. But hindsight is 20/20, and the problems with Eisenburg's version show the danger in general of being reserved in online text communication, given its low bandwidth.
- The rant also makes it clear that he thinks the whole idea of using such functions is bad, and that other authors writing somewhat similar code should also consider themselves warned, whereas Eisenburg's version makes it sound more like his complaint is specific to the case at hand - e.g. the especially poor formulation of the line criticized, compared to more elegant ways to use the overflow arithmetic functions, or the implementations of those functions.
- Nethercote explicitly noted that the rewritten version is much shorter, but actually it is missing two important factual details:
1. The claims that the code is not particularly safe, and inefficient even with "magical compiler support". (Eisenburg's version just says it's unclear and inefficient /without/ magic compiler support.)
2. The reason why Linus is pulling some random line to criticize out of a bug pull request containing many patches. Issues with pull requests are usually merge conflicts, so is there an unstated issue with that here? The actual rant makes it clear that the conflict just happened to make him notice that particular bit of code, which he found so distasteful that he felt he had to jump in.
By the way, I think Linus is full of crap: while the line at issue isn't great, the use of those overflow-arithmetic functions in general is a great idea, considering how easy it is to screw up a manual overflow check in C, and how ridiculously frequently this results in real security vulnerabilities (among other issues), including of course in Linux in the past. But that's mostly orthogonal to his manner of expression.