Ok I have to recalibrate my concept of a 'gifted programmer'. I thought it meant more than simply 'successful open source coder'.

I've tried to change kernel code that guy wrote. It's awful, with a capital A. Not a scrap of design notes or comments or procedure description, nothing. Unorganized modules with no pattern or sense.

My favorite: the variable name 'page' used in five different senses in the same module. For a page directory, a page table, an entry in a page table, an actual page of memory. Plus some indirections to the same, not distinguished in any way. May as well have used variable names i,j,k for all the help that was.

Never learned any kind of abstractions, spent half a lifetime denigrating all advances in programming since 'C'.

No, on second thought I'm not going to rethink my definition of 'gifted programmer'.