torvalds

Seriously, people on HN are enraptured when Linus Torvalds writes things that are about eight billion times more personally hostile than that.

Consider that Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman would be unqualified for C++ work.

And this echos the Torvalds stance of not breaking userspace.

It was chosen by Linus Torvalds for that reason.

Then there's disagreements as to whether things like Tivoization are really an issue, as Linus Torvalds for instance doesn't think it is and so sticks with the GPLv2.

There are plenty of people who strongly disagree with you (Linus Torvalds being the most famous example), so you are stating a matter of personal taste, not of objective fact.

I never really thought of Peter Norvig as a 'programmer' in the sense of Linus Torvalds -- I always lumped Norvig more into the high minded computer scientist camp.

This means that even without much context, such as in a diff (I think there's a quote by Torvalds related to this), or with context but without advanced IDE tools, there's no confusion as to what function is being called.

Linus Torvalds has been pretty coarse with his lieutenants in the past, but on the other hand he does not sit around in programming forums telling novice programmers that they should feel bad because they used a language which doesn't have static typing.

I'm not sure I'd consider even Linus Torvalds a "technical founder" if his role involved almost no programming.

Linus Torvalds famously smacked down C++ and gave at least two reasonable objections to using C++ for "system-level and portable" programming needs [1].

Because Linus Torvalds actually believes that userspace processes have "infinite stack".

Well their way of doing things would not get past Torvalds.

> very few people are programmers at the level of a Linus Torvalds, Peter Norvig or Fabrice Bellard.

> Imagine them telling you that you’re hopeless You don't have to imagine this with Torvalds.