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“The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

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Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#91

Post by shaklee3 »

caymanjim wrote: post #36
black-tea wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry but there's no way the 4 year old learnt anything from this. Maybe the adult did, though. Is that the point?

She learned that her opinion is valued. She learned that it's ok to question things. She likely had a sense, based on the activity that followed, that she effected change in some way. I'm sure it was explained to her, and while of course she doesn't understand what a kernel or source code are, she surely had a sense of some positive accomplishment.

I have a four year old. This patch was almost certainly submitted and entered by the parent.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#92

Post by Iv »

mxstbr wrote: post #31
gowld wrote: post #9

Linus on trivial patches: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 [ Linux-kernel added back into the cc, because I actually think this is important. ] On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote: > Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant, patches? I…

This is such a great comment and very true. Looking at the speed and attitude that maintainers handle trivial PRs with can act as an indicator of the project health and will definitely make it more inviting for new contributors!

I am a bit sad that Linus is more known for his occasional frank outbursts than for his consistent encouragement and supportive tone.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#93

Post by fouc »

sytelus wrote: post #77
gowld wrote: post #9

Linus on trivial patches: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 [ Linux-kernel added back into the cc, because I actually think this is important. ] On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote: > Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant, patches? I…

Linus says: > I think the trivial patches are among the most important ones - exactly because they are the "entry" patches for every new developer. I have been running a fairly successful open source project and this is not exactly my experience. I guess about 70% of pull request I get is simple spell, grammar, white spaces and the likes. Some time folks send this in wholesale because they want their personal favorit…

>It takes enormous amount of time to go through each line and each file to make sure something else is not sipping in.

This is an enormous exaggeration.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#94

Post by PhasmaFelis »

HarryHirsch wrote: post #61
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone can be an asshole and a great leader, at the same or different times. Linus himself, to his credit, recently admitted that he's been unreasonably abusive and is trying to learn better.[0] People are complicated. He needn't be either a saint or a demon. [0] https://lkml.org/lkml/2018/9/16/167

that he's been unreasonably abusive I have not heard of Linus taking credit for other people's work, or him getting into a fistfight at a conference or feeling up women's asses.

Good thing no one implied any of that, then!

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#95

Post by vesrah »

Andrex wrote: post #72
hyperman1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It demonstrates how Linus is not only a good programmer, but also a good leader. I get the same idea as with the first Gordon Ramsey Kitchen-fixing programmes. Apparently, people said it was insane how he dared to swear on TV. But basically, he notices things are very wrong, makes sure he gets to the bottom of the mess, and hammers the ugly message very publicly into some owner who lost any connection with reality. I…

Unrelated to the article, but the early British seasons of Kitchen Nightmares were so good. I still enjoy watching the Fox version (and his new show, 24 Hours), but I appreciate those original seasons much more.

You might like The British Baking Show on Netflix. No yelling, everyone is super supportive of each other.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#96

Post by mistercow »

kenneth wrote: post #75

This uncannily reminds me of how I first learned to program (at ~10 years old, not 4, sadly). Growing up, at my grandparents house, we had a communal old Mac (running OS 7 or 8, and BeOS for a while). Being a curious kid, I would often watch my uncle play Civilization II, and I would play myself. One day, I went to observe what he was playing, and instead it was programing in FutureBASIC. It sparked my interest, and…

The shareware era of the Mac was a magical time to be a teenage programmer. It’s one thing to get the validation of an adult’s approval, but something else entirely to have them pay you for something you built without knowing your age.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#97

Post by abhishekjha »

hermitdev wrote: post #32
mxstbr wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is such a great comment and very true. Looking at the speed and attitude that maintainers handle trivial PRs with can act as an indicator of the project health and will definitely make it more inviting for new contributors!

In my experience, you can read a (large) code base all you want, but until you get in there and start making (breaking) changes, you're not truly going to understand it. I think Linus's quote largely reflects my opinion/experience. A new comer's changes won't always be good or right, but get in there and try things out!

I have been trying to get into that with not much success. It looks like I end up trying to understand the whole thing at once. I don't know how to look at the source code which solves a specific small problem. Is there proper guide by earlier contributors about how to get used to the source and start breaking/fixing things?

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#98

Post by marmot777 »

vinceguidry wrote: post #54
marmot777 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its almost tears in my eyes level. I didn’t expect to have that reaction.

Yeah, I had the same reaction. I've noticed it whenever I see adults putting in an undue amount of effort 'just' to maintain a child's innocent expectation of a certain kind of universal justice. It's so not a part of the adult lifestyle anymore that suddenly being confronted with it affects those sensitive to it deeply. Christmas culture and thematics seems to target this dynamic.

I have a son who’s a small child so I see and encourage that magical world that we’ve all mostly forgotten about. Young childhood should be a human being’s respite from cold, hard reality. Of course, things don’t always go that way for children.

Re: “The 's' is sad”: 4-year-old submits Linux kernel doc patch (2014)

#99

Post by strken »

sytelus wrote: post #77
gowld wrote: post #9

Linus on trivial patches: https://lkml.org/lkml/2004/12/20/255 [ Linux-kernel added back into the cc, because I actually think this is important. ] On Tue, 21 Dec 2004, Jesper Juhl wrote: > Should I just stop attemting to make these trivial cleanups/fixes/whatever patches? are they more noice than gain? am I being a pain to more skilled people on lkml or can you all live with my, sometimes quite ignorant, patches? I…

Linus says: > I think the trivial patches are among the most important ones - exactly because they are the "entry" patches for every new developer. I have been running a fairly successful open source project and this is not exactly my experience. I guess about 70% of pull request I get is simple spell, grammar, white spaces and the likes. Some time folks send this in wholesale because they want their personal favorit…

I've done this for a few projects, and it's almost always a PR to fix a specific pain point that I've had, that isn't obvious from the PR itself. Examples are

- downcasing some http headers in an example (because they wouldn't match unless downcased, which I spent hours figuring out)

- replacing a regex search with a string search (because it made the method 30x faster and it was on the critical path of a weird edge case)

- allowing the user to prevent some harmless automatic stats being loaded in a postgres library on connect (because it broke cockroachdb, which uses the same wire protocol)

- quoting the urls in some generated CSS (because in base64 "//" is sometimes a valid encoding and our CSS preprocessor implemented line comments)

Now, I left a description for all of these that explained the problem, but without context they'd just look like I was collecting "contributor" labels.

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