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Linus Torvalds: 'I Do No Coding Any More'

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

#41

Post by znpy »

steelframe wrote: post #25
xfitm3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Have you considered that perhaps you're trying to have your fun at the expense of the maintainability of a shared code base?

It should be anybody's prerogative.

Maybe somebody is exploring an idea and doesn't really care about maintainablity or something else.

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

#42

Post by neididipp »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31
xfitm3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what I don't like about open source, it seems to encourage these sort of behaviours.

That’s interesting, because every office I’ve been in is like this while working only with and building proprietary software

Tool flame wars, constant bike shedding, “that’s too abstract” premature optimization wars (apparently a list comprehension is too abstract for some eng, if-else all the way down!). Every Medium post by a tech somebody becomes a religious soapbox.

I quit it all but kept my job. People complain I skip meetings and take Friday mostly off.

But my stories are done by Weds, so really I take Thur off and just do work log updates Fri to make it look like I was still working.

And the reason they’re done by Weds is cause I do the programming and skip everything else.

Job life feels like being in high school anymore. It’s about social appeasement, debating well trodden concepts at length, and exploring little new ground.

Import toolkits and go home. Like most creative endeavors, writing code to express my own mind is fun. Writing code to satisfy the pretense of our job worshipping culture is mind numbing.

Edit: Oh almost forgot my “favorite”: environments where open source is leveraged heavily. Millions of lines of imported code, at best 5% was written internally. But somehow the business environment is that they’re engineering thought leaders for building a “tech biz” around a traditional business model. Smh

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

#43

Post by coliveira »

xfitm3 wrote: post #15
hirundo wrote: 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.

This takes out the fun of programming, that's why I prefer to work on small groups. Open source unfortunately is a can of warms, a lot of good things but you need to spend too much emotional energy. Moreover, many of the people that are trying to get something out of you are paid programmers who use open source in commercial software. In my opinion this is a large part of what makes OSS difficult to deal with.

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

#44

Post by coliveira »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31
xfitm3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what I don't like about open source, it seems to encourage these sort of behaviours.

What I notice personally is that many users of OSS these days are professional programmers using open source on their corporate jobs. They are trying to push their requirements and expectations on people that are not paid to deal with them.

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

#45

Post by thedanbob »

ivanstojic wrote: post #14
gentleman11 wrote: post #5

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

And when I click on that link I immediately get a popover ad for the Imgur app. The mobile web is such a mess.

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

#46

Post by coliveira »

znpy wrote: post #41
steelframe wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you considered that perhaps you're trying to have your fun at the expense of the maintainability of a shared code base?

It should be anybody's prerogative. Maybe somebody is exploring an idea and doesn't really care about maintainablity or something else.

Moreover, everyone has a different perspective of what is a maintainable codebase. Why the other one must always be the right one?

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

#48

Post by wadkar »

hirundo wrote: 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 saw the video and later in the video he does say that he writes code inside his mail editor (pseudocode, or directly editing patches).

So I don't think he said anything of the sorts that he is not having fun programming. And in fact when the interviewer asks a question in the similar vein, Linus is quick to point out that he would be really bored if he wasn't the maintainer.

Edit: All I am trying to say is I wouldn't speculate on what Linus feels and doesn't feel when he can speak for himself (and which he does in the video). At the same time the general discussion in this subthread is very interesting.

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

#49

Post by nullc »

dasil003 wrote: post #26

> commit messages to me are almost as important as the code change itself This is high on my list of code craftsmanship points. It's very difficult to explain to young programmers who have never worked on an old code base how valuable this is when done well. In fact, often you hear complaints about how a code base "is crap", but more often than not I'd wager this is just a result of the context at the time not being…

> about how a code base "is crap"

Translation: "Not written in the particular arbitrary style that I'm used to", of course if it were written in that persons preferred style another arbitrarily selected novice would call the result crap.

I've found this to be almost universally true especially when the claim is given forcefully but not immediately backed up with a litany of actual user-impacting serious problems.

This is not to say that code can't be crap, but generally people with the wisdom needed to make that determination know better than to waste their time yelling about it and know enough to suggest how to make it better instead. They recognize that good code can be written in a multitude of styles and that there is very little objective evidence for most style choices vs most others. Or, at least, they know enough to limit their forceful remarks to the most objective considerations-- such as code which is actually a source of frequent problems.

> Taking the time to rebase, cleanup, and explain your changes in detail will pay huge dividends for any long-lived project. I've literally had successors write me a thank you note for a commit message from over a decade ago because I take this so seriously.

Likewise, though more frequently I've been frustrated to see people make grave errors "fixing" correct code that they would have understood if they bothered to look at the message on the commit which introduced the "error" (or read the adjacent comment).

The culture of writing good, informative commit messages and comments needs to go hand in hand with a culture of reading them. Neither works in isolation.

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

#50

Post by notsag-hn »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #31
xfitm3 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is what I don't like about open source, it seems to encourage these sort of behaviours.

Open source itself does not encourage that kind of behavior, it's just there are a lot of arseholes developers like in any other area and because it's much more transparent you can actually see the toxic discussions. But that depends on the project, it's not fair to say it's connected to open source
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