He has not insulted any people though. He has said bad things about the piece of software called gcc-4.9.0, but he has not once in that email adressed a person in a negative way.
Plus, the bug report he filed towards gcc is entirely matter-of-fact and polite.
As I've worked with more and more younger developers ("Millennials" or "hipsters" or whatever you want to call them), I've noticed that many of them consider criticism of somebody's work to be a criticism of the work's creator himself or herself.
I don't really know for sure why this is. Maybe they're more attached to what they've created, seeing it more as a work of art or something like that, instead of just a tool?
"He has not insulted any people though. He has said bad things about the piece of software called gcc-4.9.0..."
A number of people have made that point.
So if I were to say "Hacker News' emotional maturity ranks below that of 12-year-olds, who generally recognize that contempt expressed for an inanimate entity is actually targeted at the persons who created the flaw in question", that would not be taken personally?
Well, the GCC developers that I know or have otherwise worked with at one time or another are mature men in their 30s or 40s, if not older at this point. Being adults and professionals, they accept that they may just accidentally make mistakes when working on rather complex tools. They don't really care how the problems are pointed out, as their interest is in getting the problems fixed, and not taking it personally.
These people are very different from, say, the young Rubyist who will have his feelings hurt when legitimate flaws are pointed out with something he's worked on. The GCC developers won't cry if you report a bug, and they won't deny that it exists to try to save face. Getting the bugs fixed is what matters to them, so they don't waste time allowing their feelings to be hurt by hyperbolic mailing list discussion.
You're obviously implying that the GCC developers know of the Linux kernel mailing list archives, they could potentially read the emails, the content of the emails could potentially hurt their feelings, this could potentially be considered insulting to them, and that makes it wrong, and so on and so forth.
What I'm saying is that the scenario you've built up isn't very realistic at all. The GCC developers I've dealt with would not waste their time getting offended. What was said in the mailing list, and its tone, is pretty much irrelevant. Getting the problem fixed is what matters to them.
Not at all. I was making no positive logical argument.
Merely pointing out the flaw in the one I responded to.
To put it plainly, the post I responded to made the claim: "Linus was nice when he posted it to the GCC list; therefore everything is fine." This argument doesn't hinge on the GCC guys having thick skin but rather on the apparent unlikeliness of their seeing the more offensive messages in the kernel list.
Further, even if we take into account the 'thick skin' argument, it does not excuse the behavior-- bad behavior is bad even if the affected party doesn't think so. This is why often times the State will prosecute domestic violence cases even when the affected spouse/partner does not wish to do so.
> This argument doesn't hinge on the GCC guys having thick skin but rather on the apparent unlikeliness of their seeing the more offensive messages in the kernel list.
I made no such argument; in fact my reply to you specifically recognized the fact that a GCC developer might come across Linus' message on the Linux kernel list. My argument was that such a GCC developer would recognize that the Linux kernel mailing list does not belong to him or his project, it belongs to Linus and his project, and the fact that Linus' tone when he posted to GCC's bug tracker was quite different shows that Linus understands the difference too.
Maybe it would help if you read the conversation again. I'll paste here for convenience:
>>>>>> Linus just being Linus (paraphrased).
>>>>> That may be so but I'm pretty sure that pretty much every study that's been done on this says insulting people is demotivating and generally destructive behaviour.
>>>> He has not insulted any people though. He has said bad things about the piece of software called gcc-4.9.0, but he has not once in that email adressed a person in a negative way.
>>> Uh, do you think GCC just spontaneously sprung forth into being? No, it was created by people, and Linus is indirectly insulting them.
>> As a number of people have already commented, when Linus posted the bug report to the GCC project, he was careful not to insult them.
> Do you think those people exist in some sort of vacuum where they don't have access to (or will become aware of) the kernel mailing list thread?
Did you really intend to say that a person can only be insulted if they are insulted in every place a particular issue is discussed? Or are you saying that if a person is treated kindly in at least one avenue, then it doesn't matter how many others they may be insulted in (i.e., the one kind treatment negates all the other offenses)?
Since you brought it up in your quote, I should clarify that I agree with the person who said that insulting a piece of software is not the same as insulting the person who created it, not even "indirectly".
That said, my own argument had nothing to do with "what counts as an insult", whether Linus being non-insulting on the GCC bug tracker "cancels out" what he said on the kernel mailing list, etc., etc. I was simply pointing out that the fact that Linus was not insulting when he posted the bug on the GCC bug tracker indicates that he had a genuine intention to help get the bug fixed. (The GCC bug tracker thread makes it clear that the GCC developers recognized that too.)
In other words, I (like the other commenters I referred to) was focusing on whether or not Linus was actually trying to help or not, and what actually got accomplished as a result of his raising the issue. You are focusing on what kind of language he used and where, whether it was "kind", whether "kind" language in one place "cancels out" insulting language in another place, etc., regardless of the substance of what does or does not get accomplished. I was not making any claim whatever about the questions you raise.
I think if you read the entire thread it should be clear that the topic of conversation was in fact "the lack of kindness in Mr Torvalds' public persona". It is in fact your attempt to focus on whether Linus was actually "trying to be altruistic" or not which is in fact incongruous (i.e., discontinuous) with the rest of the conversation. One can "try to be altruistic" all they want but if they cannot package it in nice words, then they are merely going to be [rightly] ridiculed for the "attempt". Also, as I pointed out before, the mere fact that Mr Torvalds can get it right in one context but not in another shows that he in fact knows the difference between right and wrong.
> One can "try to be altruistic" all they want but if they cannot package it in nice words, then they are merely going to be [rightly] ridiculed for the "attempt"
But that's not what actually happened, as far as I can see; Linus' post on the GCC bug tracker appears to have gotten the GCC developers to pay attention to the bug, not to ridicule Linus for using nice language on their bug tracker but insulting language on his own mailing list.
> the mere fact that Mr Torvalds can get it right in one context but not in another shows that he in fact knows the difference between right and wrong
I would say it shows that he knows the difference between one context and another. Whether or not that difference is also "the difference between right and wrong" is one of the points at issue; you can't just assume that your personal opinion about that is shared by everybody. As you pointed out in an earlier post, it's up to each of us to decide that for ourselves.
> But that's not what actually happened, as far as I can see; Linus' post on the GCC bug tracker appears to have gotten the GCC developers to pay attention to the bug, not to ridicule Linus for using nice language on their bug tracker but insulting language on his own mailing list.
The 'ridicule' I was referring to is this firestorm of a thread: the mere fact that we are even talking about this on HackerNews (and the wider Internets) and that a large majority of the commenters here agree with me that it was, in fact, deserving of ridicule.
> Whether or not that difference is also "the difference between right and wrong" is one of the points at issue;
Whether one can [in his own reasoning] get all the way to 'wrong' from 'adolescent, silly & childish' is really quite a minor issue to me. But, I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that it was in fact pretty adolescent, silly & childish (i.e., socially under-developed) and that's enough for me.
Further, if I had to choose one form of overly adolescent behavior, it would be the fun type coming from 'brogrammers' and startup culture rather than this trite anti-social and uber-negative poison from 'hardcore Linux(TM) hackers' (but I can certainly understand that this is merely a preference of mine in particular).
> The 'ridicule' I was referring to is this firestorm of a thread
Which is not going to have any effect on the Linux kernel or the GCC compiler. I'm not participating here because I think it will change anything substantive; I'm just doing it because I feel like it.
> a large majority of the commenters here agree with me
Have you actually counted?
> I think it's pretty obvious to most adults that it was in fact pretty adolescent, silly & childish
I think you are overestimating how many "adults" agree with you.
Even if we disagree about the other matters being discussed earlier, I do have to agree with you about the misvoting you've been subjected to.
There is no legitimate reason for your comments to have been voted down.
I'm seeing this sort of blatant and unjustifiable misvoting happening more and more often here. It's really making it harder to read a lot of legitimate content, and it's discouraging participation in otherwise perfectly fine discussion.
For the record, I strongly disagree, but I doubt we're going to resolve that here. I would merely point out that one of the main reasons we have different forums for discussion with different rules is precisely to provide different contexts. Wanting every forum in every context to conform to your preferred rules is ridiculous and unrealistic. Part of the price of living in a free society is that you will sometimes come across things that you find offensive, and you'll just have to deal. Understanding things in their proper context is a big part of dealing.
Well, these were both very public forums. And the fact remains that Linus' behavior on his mailing list (i.e., in the comfort of his own lair) was rather silly and childish. I don't think anyone with his level of experience with large complex systems of software should have a hard time imagining how a bug such as this could be introduced in what has to at this point be considered a program with a life of its own (not that much unlike a machine-generated proof or some other reserve of Big Data(TM)). Yet, instead of jumping to this [obvious] conclusion, he rather chose the vastly more unlikely explanation of incompetence/ willful ignorance/ etc and went on a childish profanity-laced tirade so all of his [equally adolescent] hero-worshippers could get a [cheap] laugh. Also, the fact that there were in fact two very different presentations here from Linus is further proof of the fact that one of them was uncalled for.
Only in the sense that you can view them on the Internet. But there are lots of forums that anyone can view on the Internet, with a wide variety of norms. Just as in the real world, there are lots of "public" places where in theory anyone can show up, with a wide variety of norms. Anyone who doesn't like the norms of a particular place is free not to go there.
> the fact that there were in fact two very different presentations here from Linus is further proof of the fact that one of them was uncalled for
No, it isn't, because, once again, the two presentations were made in different contexts for different purposes. On the GCC bug tracker, Linus' purpose was to inform them of the issue and try to help resolve it. On the kernel mailing list, his purpose was to make sure that the compiler issue did not result in problems with the kernel. The latter purpose may well require a different style of presentation than the former; and since it's Linus' kernel and mailing list, he gets to judge what style is required to accomplish his purpose there.
Looks like you chose to nitpick two minor points of my last message instead of focusing on the single substantial point which still remains.
However, I will still respond to your nitpicks: public is public. If you don't want to be seen as an unsavory character, you would do well to not say mean and nasty things about other human beings in public (and as the Donald Sterling case taught us, perhaps even in private). If you want to be a truly virtuous human being, you will not do so either in public or in private but that is certainly up to you to decide. I think it is the case that a person who bad mouths people in their [perceived] absence but not in their presence is a morally compromised individual but that is for you to decide if you want to keep company with that sort or not. Just be forewarned: if they are bad mouthing other people around you then they are likely doing the same about you in your absence.
My response to your second nitpick is essentially the same as the one above. But, I would still be interested to see if you have any thoughts on the [remaining previously ignored] substantial point in my last message to you.
> the single substantial point which still remains
If you mean the fact that in his LKML post (but not in the GCC bug tracker) Linus attributed the bug to "incompetence/ willful ignorance/ etc" instead of assuming that it just snuck in (I'm not sure I agree with that interpretation, but I'll adopt it here for the sake of discussion), for a bug that's severe enough to make Linus prohibit kernel compiles using the affected version of gcc, I'm not sure what the difference is, practically speaking. Either way, the compiler can't be used with the bug present, so, substantively, it doesn't matter whether the bug just snuck in or the GCC developers wilfully ignored the behavior; that version of gcc can't be used to compile the kernel until the bug is fixed.
As you so aptly pointed out, the GCC maintainers are no fools but rather mature, competent professionals. I think the explanation that it was a simple oversight is far more likely than malice or incompetence.
There are many ways in which you can criticise a project without blaming those involved but as a rule when you see the phrase "We're talking "sloth that was dropped on the head as a baby" level retardation levels", that's not the space you're in.
Yeah, actually he did. He explicitly addressed it as "your compiler" and then proceeded to spew venom. That turns it into an attack against a person and not just code criticism.
Plus, the bug report he filed towards gcc is entirely matter-of-fact and polite.