Earlier quoted context omitted.
When you say "trying to address an issue politically", that sort of implies a context in which you're pushing back against someone else who's already employed a more "Linus-like" approach. That's not what the parent comment was suggesting. Someone like Knuth isn't accused of valuing politics over technical merit because he simply addresses technical merit in a polite way. I'm not one of the people who cares all that…
I love Donald Knuth but let's face it, from a productivity standpoint he's strictly below average. He's a perfectionist and he seems to get distracted easily. Like me, he seems to overly inured to the siren song of Force Multipliers (making other people more productive) and really should have spent more time practicing the craft. If I had it to do over again I probably would have spent a little more time coding and a…
In fact, Donald Knuth is so below average from a productivity standpoint that there is an entire book published about books and papers that Donald Knuth published: http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/cp.html