I feel like Tovald should watch DHH's railsconf talk on progress & the 'old' mentality. This feels alarmist, but he like any other githubber gets to choose what gets accepted or rejected.
Who cares if Torvalds has 'more' technical chops than DHH...DHH might be more abrasive, but it is a good abrasive. He is always pushing the community forward and encouraging Rails developers to be a little better. He is not afraid to embrace new technologies and give credit where its due.
Can't tell when last I have seen these older guys do the same.
I have never once bashed his contributions to the community and OSS. Just like I would never do the same for the creators of Java, C, PHP, all of which I don't use and have no interest in. But there is significant value in all of them and we are all better off for their existence.
My point was, more often than not....you hear the creators of these 'foundational' contributions complaining about new things (either new approaches which were different than theirs, or they shit on new languages because those languages don't have some purist function that theirs does or doesn't achieve the same low-level execution speed that theirs does).
DHH can be a dick, but I have never seen him shit on someone for trying something new (even within the Ruby & Rails core). That being said, I am not saying he doesn't disagree with the approach that people take....but there is a difference between shitting on someone/something and disagreeing with it.
What Linus did here was shit all over Github's implementation of the pull request - because it is different than his implementation would have been.
I'm not going to speculate, but it's clear you are talking out your ass.
Linus has spend the last 20+ years building one of the most important pieces of software in existence. Not only that, but he created git, without which the Github guys, DHH, and everyone else would be using fucking Subversion. The process that he follows for kernel development does not exist out of vanity, it serves an actual proven purpose. Linus' care and attention to detail are a big part of why you can rely on the stability of Linux over time. For you to come in here spouting off some nonsense about why he does this or why he does that without clue #1 as to the real reasons, and then to pay homage to the guys who are "trying something new" all the time standing on the shoulders of said giants, well, it's a slap in the face. Respect is due my friend.
I think for all software engineers who are old enough, we all know writing software is a social activity and sometime it is better to make projects manageable.
I think any one who creates technologies has to understand that design decision is an "Opinion".
I doubt we are better off for PHP's existence (only mentioning the oxymoron "PHP security" should be enough to make this point), many would argue the same for Java (unless you are a consultant or book publisher), and some have argued the same for C.
And just because something is new doesn't make it good, in the programming world the number of square wheels built grows every day, and we are in danger of the resulting mountain collapsing and burying us all in a tangle of inscrutable complexity of bad solutions to problems that were solved long ago.