[jrockway]

The second line is a great counter-argument.

In reality, this clever quip is just Linus' way of telling people to go away. He certainly talks a lot about code he has no intention of writing. (He does write a lot of code, too.)

[bk]

Regardless of its originator, to me the quote just serves as a reminder that my true productivity and progress are based on the quality and speed with which I can write (or integrate other people's) code (as opposed to talking about features, dreaming of all the way things could be done, etc.).

It's easy for me to outline how a great piece of software X is supposed to function, but I'm still surprised every time how much more work ends up going into the actual implementation compared to the conceptual simplicity of the design. So, similar to "writing is thinking" I believe that "coding is thinking" as well.