[testdelacc1]

Treating people poorly isn’t a quirk of nerd culture. Even Linus doesn’t think so.

> This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.

> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.

> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.

> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.

And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive as beneath you.

[brabel]

But it is very common. I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where he says anyone using a garbage collected language is stupid and just not a good programmer! Just like that he offended 95% of our industry. He even said people who use smart pointers are just beginners and haven’t learned the true ways yet, offending the remaining 5%. And this sort of comment and people supporting those opinions are extremely common!

[latexr]

> But it is very common.

It’s important to keep in mind that “common” doesn’t mean “right” or “positive”. Lots of things, such as CFCs in aerosol spray cans and radioactive elements in household items used to be common.

I’m not saying that’s what your argument is—on the contrary, I get the feeling you’re making a statement and not justifying it—but still think it’s an important point to not forget.

> I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where

Do you remember what video it was? That’s a bit disappointing and I’d like to see for myself to gather context and tone. From all I’ve seen from Casey I’d expect gentle bashing of languages but not groups of people. Though I mostly have seen Casey on his own teaching or being interviewed one-on-one, I get the feeling he might be different in podcasts.

[brabel]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA

[testdelacc1]

I truly feel like Linus did a lot of damage by normalising his brand of leadership. Younger developers wanting to emulate someone as accomplished as Linus unsurprisingly adopted the habits that are easiest to emulate - name calling, attacking, denigrating, dismissing.

Linus is better now but the behaviour is ingrained into so many people. They now “tell it like it is”, are “straight shooters”, don’t have time to be “politically correct” and so on.