Quotes of the week [LWN.net]

Hm, I've never heard the driver model be called a "complete design paradigm" in the past. I've heard it called a lot of real nasty things though.

-- Greg Kroah-Hartman

So don't fall for the classic "second system syndrome". The classic reason for getting the second system wrong is because you focus on the issues people complain about, and not on the issues that work well (because the issues that work fine are obviously not getting a lot of attention).

-- Linus Torvalds

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Linus is Linus

Posted Nov 23, 2006 19:38 UTC (Thu) by kevinbsmith (guest, #4778) [Link]

I thought the more interesting (or at least provocative) quote from Linus's email was:

"bk did it that way, and like it or not, bk was the first usable distributed system. hg is totally uninteresting."

Gotta love the way he abbreviates the thought "is totally uninteresting to me" into a form implying universal truth.

Linus is Linus

Posted Nov 24, 2006 1:44 UTC (Fri) by bignose (subscriber, #40) [Link]

He abbreviated "bk was the first usable distributed system for my particular needs", also.

Distributed VCS, even free-software distributed VCS, was usable for people other than Linus before the existence of BitKeeper.

Yes, this does seem to be a consistent characteristic of Linus's proclamations: he presents personal preference and opinion as universal truth.

Not that this trait distinguishes him from the bulk of humanity, of course :-)

Linus is Linus

Posted Nov 26, 2006 1:29 UTC (Sun) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

It is not my impression that he abbreviated or implied anything. He intended to state explicitly a universal truth.

Nonetheless, he undoubtedly expects his audience to understand that he's not the authority on that truth and therefore to believe something weaker, such as that hg is uninteresting only to Linus and only for a particular application.

And he expected anyone who has reason not to believe the universal truth to contradict him.

I find it much preferable for people to speak in simple over-general statements and trust people to know with what grain of salt to take it than to bury everything in qualifications. For example, I hate "in my opinion." It's usually patently obvious that the speaker is not stating someone else's opinion.

Also, in an argument it's better just to state a proposition and let someone else fill in the qualifications as contradictions than to put in all the "as far as I know" weasel words.