[valand]

Simplified and abstracted, Great programmers think things through. They don't just figure out how to make things work. They think about the tools itself (in this case their tools are the programming language) and see whether certain pattern in a PL produce the best outcome, either the semantic or the performance.

I think what Linus saw was the pattern where bad programmers tend to intersect with the demographic of c++ and java

It is an unfortunate generalization, since I have one person in mind who is very mature in software development and spends a lot of time in c++ due to job and experience circumstances.

But since it's Linus, it might be a valid generalization for us to watch out for, regardless if it is accurate or not