Earlier quoted context omitted.
False dichotomy. "Writing professionally" is also known as "communicating effectively" and it is part of doing/leading. Linus made an enormous impact, certainly. He'd have had an even bigger impact if he was less of a caustic dick. And before you say that there's a tradeoff involved and that genius technical people are just that way, look up Berkson's paradox.
Linus is a great example actually, because people pointed out he was being too much of an asshole, and he eventually agreed, and he reduced the toxicity of his rhetoric, but you can bet if the situation called for it, he would still use vulgarity to get his point across. If you totally ban profanity or vulgarity, all you do is force other words to take up the slack of what people use those words for, and therefore in…
The idea that removing vulgarity will increase ambiguity in this context is very strange. In terms of communication, the only use for vulgarity is to convey emotion. That's not relevant here. If we ban it, maybe people will explain why something is shit, instead of just saying it's shit. Forcing other words to take up the slack is a feature, not a bug.
I know about the fast inverse square root code. I could probably give a decent if somewhat vague overview of how it works from memory. I don't recall the WTF comment, and that certainly isn't why I heard about it.
This is a great example of what I'm saying. Commenting 0x5f3759df "what the fuck?" isn't useful. It tells me the author was confused or amazed or something. Imagine if instead they had commented, "Compute an initial guess by negating and halving the exponent. 0x5f3759df was found by experimenting and seems to give a good guess in the mantissa bits."