[dzaima]

I think it's important to take context in mind here - this isn't how linus responds to every suboptimal patch. If you already say "this patch is bad" for many patches with average levels of bad, repeating that same thing for something which in Linus's mind is likely many magnitudes worse is gonna lose very important information!

(an alternative would be scaling back the severity of all negative speech, but then you'd drastically reduce the range of dislike showable for the much more frequent less severe cases; I do think Linus here might have gone too hard here, but don't think it's too far off what could be considered appropriate)

[avl999]

I reject PRs every day at work with varying level of "badness" and it works just fine. Normal people can put 20 seconds of thought and come up with a response that explains why a patch is unacceptable without resorting to name calling, even in this PR response Linus does that for the most part but in the end just can't help himself from throwing in a couple of petty jabs. There are other open source communities where this behavior would be unacceptable (for example the GoLang core team).

I am calling this out because Linus specifically said that he wants to handle himself better in public, he is aware of how he comes across and wants to change, it is not an RMS type situation where the guy has no self-awareness. Reading the rest of the thread I bet he regretted his response esp considering the response of the branch maintainer.

[bombcar]

If your speech can range from -127 to 128 (positive to negative) and you intentionally restrict yourself to a subset thereof, you lose some of the expressive ability.