[yoduh]

It's funny what Torvalds said about "good taste" because I have had the same sort of idea for years. But I'd never heard any programmer articulate it as such. I also call it "sensibilities". I have no clue if his idea of what is "good taste" is even remotely similar to mine, but it's interesting that he also thinks about this notion of "good taste". I can eliminate programmers and programs very quickly using this sort of qualitative assessment. It might not even be necessary to see any code. Just knowing how they would approach a problem, how they would design a solution (Rube Goldberg machine), and of course what language they would use says something about their "tastes". It's not so much a matter of what they do or don't know how to do, it's their selections from among different choices. Imagine hypothetically a programmer knows every language and can implement any design. The language he chooses and the design he chooses tells us about his "taste".

[btbuilder]

I don't believe he said he liked VB, he actually said as a language it isn't great. What he did say is that the way it simplified database access gave us something extremely powerful and influential even though it was not (and isn't) seen as particularly disruptive or new. This seems inline with other statements from Linus w.r.t. the value of C++ and OOP in general. A very pragmatic man. I believe it also aligns with many of the answers to what will be the "next big thing.".