Not much of a difference if it was directed at a patch or person - calling someone's end-work idiotic and unintelligent is basically saying the same of it's creator...

It might be better than previous language, but it's still crass and abusive on some level.

> Not much of a difference if it was directed at a patch or person - calling someone's end-work idiotic and unintelligent is basically saying the same of it's creator...

No? I’d like to think I’m not, generally speaking, that stupid, but I’ve certainly made profoundly stupid decisions, and I sure hope I’m not as much of an idiot as the most idiotic code I’ve ever written.

The hard boundary between criticism and personal attack, for me, lies precisely between saying someone’s work is unacceptable because they’re stupid and saying that work is unacceptable because it itself is stupid.

I can’t say it doesn’t matter at all who I’m speaking to. Most sharply, I’ve interacted with a person who regularly seemed wrong in simple ways when I was speaking to them, then several hours afterwards I realized their reasoning might not have been as careful as I’d have liked but is still most probably sound. A more generally applicable point is that I’m not going to let myself go all the way to loudly pointing to things on the blackboard when I’m teaching an introductory maths course, even though there definitely are people with whom I’ve interacted in that manner and walked away smarter for the experience. But at the end of the day, either I think you’re right or I don’t.

So if you think my code is idiotic, bloody well say so. It’s going to hurt a bit, but less than if I have to discover that over several polite-language roundtrips, or worse, through polite silence. You can’t make learning not hurt at all, better just get it over with.

I'm sure it's the patch that feels insulted instead of its author.

If you read the thread on the mailing list, the maintainer of the branch took it as constructive criticism and FWIW the followup of Linus didn't use any insulting phrases.

It wasn't apparently the first blunder on their part (even though it was somebody else who programmed it this way)

I'm glad to hear the maintainer has a thick skin and takes insults as constructively as he can.