[dmart]

This was an interesting comment thread, and honestly you have to hand it to Linus for continuing to respond and expand on his viewpoints in a pretty level-headed way.

Also, I was reading through it on a phone, which brought to light an interesting point regarding the hard line-wrapping discussion that occurs further on down the thread: when you hard-wrap your lines, you're also defining a minimum line width, under which lines break in awful jagged ways.

I can understand the rationale for hard-wrapping in commit messages, but it drives me up a wall when people use it in things like email or Markdown documents.

[bigyikes]

Was he level-headed? Talking like that at work might get me fired.

It would be better if he just ignored the PR instead of making a scene.

Maybe I’m just sensitive

[shakna]

> Was he level-headed? Talking like that at work might get me fired.

In my experience, this is very much a cultural thing.

The way Linus talks is the usual way that people talk at most of the workplaces I've been at over the years in Australia. However, we're not exactly known as a sensitive people. If something is crap, we call it crap. It isn't generally taken personally. It isn't seen as overly aggressive. If someone is failing to get a point, they will get called an idiot, but people will continue to explain. It isn't seen as a personal attack, just normal frustration.

However, when dealing with other national backgrounds, we're also expected to adapt our behaviour. The number of times I get a 'yes' answer from Asia that absolutely does not mean 'yes' is probably in the high double figures per day. Americans tend to expect the "compliment sandwhich" when you need to point out a flaw in their work, and will take it personally if you say that they've chosen the wrong approach. There's less of a divorce between the work and the person.

[emodendroket]

I really don't see how writing "you're a moron" to end a message where you call your interlocutor an example of why you dislike something could be construed as anything other than a personal attack.

[andrei_says_]

> The number of times I get a 'yes' answer from Asia that absolutely does not mean 'yes' is probably in the high double figures per day.

This has cost me time, money, and caused unnecessary risks.

How do you get around it?

[shakna]

There's no simple answer, really.

Where possible, cultivating relations helps. People tend to act in patterns when they're avoiding something so you can learn to pick up when you're treading towards something uncomfortable for them.

Offering opportunities to say things in a face-saving way is a serious skill. Learning how to phrase things in that way where possible can help, but becomes less helpful if it is allowed to become an excuse. Balancing act.

However, moments where you need to be insensitive may still happen. Like getting unpaid bills actually paid.

[phist_mcgee]

I will respectfully disagree with you. I am Australian, and have worked in many workplaces across white and blue collar jobs. What you are describing is an attitude that is fast falling out of favour, and in my mind has died in the last ten years. We do not have a culture of brutal honetsy, and I think that this is a good thing. That honesty may be refreshing to you, but there are many people in the workplace who do not communicate that way, and can be hurt or marginalised by that kind of manner.

You are perpetuating a myth of the straight shooting hard working everyman who calls it how he sees it. This is not the Australia I inhabit, and working with many foreign born individuals, along with different genders has proven to me that this strategy only perpetuates power imbalances among men.

Linus' behaviour would be a fireable offence in my last few workplaces, and I have worked in finance, in government, and in consulting.

I think you need to think a little more broadly about your idea of whether people will just 'suck it up and get on with it' attitude, and ask yourself if there are people you are hurting along the way.

[fermienrico]

Honesty is truth and we're working hard to discover it, fix it and engineer things well. If we don't confront truth in favor of hurting people, oh boy... the world is regressing faster than ever.

This is how you get a snowflake organization that has way too many people complaining, not learning to tolerate and generally bickering around about this or that.

FAANG and silicon valley culture unfortunately is moving in that direction, if not leading it. I detest it with a passion.

[tgaj]

And that's how we got arguments like "TAB vs spaces". Because of course one od these choices is ultimate engineering truth worth fighting for. Snowflakes willa never understand. (Sarcasm off)

[shakna]

> This is not the Australia I inhabit, and working with many foreign born individuals, along with different genders has proven to me that this strategy only perpetuates power imbalances among men.

Well, whilst I clearly disagree with you, I am utterly confused by what the hell this has to do with gender.

If there's any inequality in the behaviour, my female managers may have been among the rougher ones over the years... But I don't think I've seen a difference between any of the guys and gals. Quiet ones, or loud ones, I think most people I've worked with have been willing to say, "That sounds like a stupid idea. Why don't we do it this way instead?"

There has always been a divorce between the work, and the person.

[phist_mcgee]

This is anecdotal. There is so much evidence out there around toxic workplace cultures that are dominated by unsympathetic individuals. This is overwhelmingly the domain of men, and particularly white men. You cannot choose to ignore this just because you think others are like you, and can "handle it". Things like pay, promotions, harassment, and having your voice heard and much more are affected by these biases and cultures in workplaces. Please do not cite an anecdote that claims that your bias does not exist. I am bringing up gender and ethnicity because you have reduced so many people in this country to a person who thinks and speaks like you. This is not how the world works, and being cognizant that something that is just "straight talking" to you, can come across as dominating by someone else.

And I refute the idea that there is a divorce between the person and work. If that was the case, why do so many people suffer stress, anxiety and depression over their work place culture. Does workplace toxicity not occur to you? There is no divorce while people are marginalised, across all spectrums and walks of life.

[shakna]

I'm not denying that problems with equality exist, at all. I've also made several notes about adjusting your behaviour to match the people you're working with. People are still people.

Workplace toxicity definitely can exist. I'm hardly a stranger to that. I don't see a cultural misunderstanding as toxic behaviour. A cultural clash is a problem, in that it create a communication barrier.

For example, one is currently between you and I, as you seem to be thinking that roughness is allowed irregardless of how people respond to it by your use of the phrase "handle it". If you're impacting someone, then there's a problem. By the same token, there's also a problem if you can't point out when crap is crap. In either case, people don't exist in a vacuum and should be expected to adapt to each other.

It appears that in your mind, that honesty without ritual is somehow a reflection of ongoing discrimination, specifically wider discrimination. Whilst you view it as a abusive, there's no way forward, for either of us.

If I accurately point out that every part of code presented in a review was done the wrong way, and what to do to fix it, it will come across as a personal attack, no matter how kind I try and be. I have to compromise and accept some level of terribleness. I can't even say that they've had a bad day and need to try again. (I have been known to send people home, especially during the death march, without impact to pay or bonuses, because they're burned out and aren't helping the team).

Whereas on the other hand I am accepting of someone tearing down my work, the most junior member of the team I'm working with should, with some encouragement, be able to hold me accountable to my own work. They can point out if I'm heading down the wrong path. We can have active conversations about the tradeoffs that the team are making. Nobody on the team should feel they can't disagree with the team lead. Sometimes that can mean the entire team agrees that something is crap, but we have to do it anyway, but more often it means that we can catch problems early.

It is my experience that being able to point out problems, without ceremony, is more likely to lead to equality, than discrimination. I've acknowledged it is not yours. If you want to have a conversation about actual discrimination - that's another story altogether. I'm more than happy to discuss my own struggles such as my sexuality having been raised at board meetings, or the multiple times I've encouraged those I've worked with to take my employer to court because of the way they're being treated. There are toxic parts of culture in Australia. The fact we can't address something as simple as the pay gap is nothing short of horrifying.

I just don't see how a lack of ritualised and exhausting conversation is in fact discrimination. You don't have to live with false manners to be able to speak with the people around you on equal terms. But, again, people don't exist purely as a concept. You adapt to the people you speak to. If you were to check over my few comments to you, you'll find that the patterns have changed. I have tried to adapt how I am speaking to help you understand my perspective, as I hope you would do for me.

The day the team can't call me a moron, is the day I've failed them.

[phist_mcgee]

If I called a coworker a moron on a PR, I would be disciplined or fired. We have a zero tolerance for disrespect in our workplace, and I do not think that his status as a 'superstar programmer' should allow him the privilege to call people names. Even if he works for free, it is not ok to think of and treat others this way.

[microtherion]

To his credit, I believe he has considerably mended his ways in recent years. When I came across the first hostile comment (and no, this was not "straight shooting, get to the point", this was going out of his way to make an ad hominem attack), I was wondering whether he'd regressed, until I saw the date.

[MrDresden]

Talking like that to a coworker might cause some friction in the team (more or less depending on social norms in your country of origin/work)

But put your self into the shoes if Linus.

You are at the head of one of the most important FOSS projects. You probably get a endless stream of noise directed your way (emails, tweets, PR's, commments in general).

You don't respond to it all, because you can't (and shouldn't). But in certain cases you do, and initially you give reasons for why you wont accept the PR.

And now that you have given something your attention, the various elements on the internet pile on, each believing that their opinions regarding your repository and its rules are important to voice to you.

I don't see him acting in any way that isn't completely justified in this context.

[ben0x539]

I could see giving Torvalds credit for taking the time to engage in a discussion here at all. It's not an acceptable way to talk to people, but it's clearly putting a lot of effort into actually making people understand his reasoning and clarifying in followup comments etc.

[KirillPanov]

> it drives me up a wall when people use it in things like email or Markdown documents

Are there many editors that can rewrap long lines in a Markdown-aware way when displaying long lines?

I mean if you create an outline with significant nesting depth (like 3+ levels) and all the items are more than one screenwidth worth of text, the editor linewrapping is going to make it impossible to see the structure.

Otherwise you get this unreadable mess:

  .   + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar
  .   baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .   bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .       + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .   bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .   bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz

Instead of this visually-apparent structure at the left edge (produced using emacs's hard-rewrap command "fill-region"):

  .   + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar
  .     baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .       bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .       + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .         bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz
  .     + Foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz foo
  .       bar baz foo bar baz foo bar baz

(I had to add the periods at the left edge to prevent HackerNews's awful markup processor from "helpfully" mangling things... apparently "verbatim" only means "verbatim" if the whole block has the same level of indentation or something)

Hard-wrapping is basically an acknowledgement that text editors are never going to understand the semantics of all the markups and programming languages we use. And web browser text-edit widgets will be even worse. Then there's the situation where you have markup-within-code-comments. I don't think it's reasonable to expect editors to recognize how to rewrap all these different cases intelligently.

[dmart]

With your example of a nested list, VSCode will correctly display line-wrapped inner items at the same indentation level.

[KirillPanov]

Do you use VSCode to read your emails and edit Wikipedia?

Will it do this for Markdown inside of comments in C/C++/Rust code?

How does it even know you're using Markdown in comments as opposed to something else?

(I'll have to trust your answers since I don't have a Windows machine, let alone a Visual Studio license)

[dmart]

I mean, there are definitely places where hard wrapping makes sense or is the only option. I’m not saying it’s never the right thing to do, just that with emails or full-Markdown docs specifically it tends to restrict the ability to render in an optimal manner more than it helps.

[jscholes]

> (I'll have to trust your answers since I don't have a Windows machine, let alone a Visual Studio license)

You don't need a Windows machine or Visual Studio license to use VS Code, which is both cross-platform and free.