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Comment by zalew | Hacker News Reader

you don't want to use Linux in a world where the BDFL is afraid of hurting feelings of patch submitters.

I don't know. By swearing, it tells me that he spends more time caring about their feelings. If he could just say "No" instead of "Fuck no! I'm not accept that shit!" he'd save a lot of time and energy dealing with people's feelings.

>If he could just say "No" instead of "Fuck no! I'm not accept that shit!" he'd save a lot of time and energy dealing with people's feelings.

If he said "no" instead of "fuck no!" he wouldn't have gotten the message of how fucked up the code is across.

I review code frequently. When some of the code is bad, I manage to impress upon the writer that it's not up to scratch and why, and they produce better code to replace it and continue to produce better code in the future. Sometimes it's really fucked up code. Really bad.

Yet, incredibly, I don't have to use the word "fuck" at all. Amazing, I know. It's as if it's possible for someone to listen to criticism and improve their work without having to be screamed at. I have funny memories in which this happened to me as well; I wrote bad code, and then someone explained to me what was wrong with it, and then I wrote better code. Again, nobody said "fuck". Truly amazing.

>Yet, incredibly, I don't have to use the word "fuck" at all. Amazing, I know. It's as if it's possible for someone to listen to criticism and improve their work without having to be screamed at.

For some yes. Doesn't work with all.

If it were me and he said "no", my reaction would be, "whoops, my bad". If he said "fuck no, etc", I would be like, "shit, I better not do that again".

That's a good insight. He might even be addicted in some way to the drama he creates.

I think the point is the next time someone goes to commit a change which fixes nothing and won't even compile, they will think twice and actually test it first due to the chastising they received the previous time they did it. Then there does not need to be a second "No". The quality of the software goes up.

If that were the case, people would know about it before hand. Linus' rants are well-known and well-published. So, pretty sure it's not having it's intended effect. Couple that with the fact that he'll rant and people who have been long-time contributors.

So, what is it really solving? Nothing for new contributors. Nothing for old contributors.

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