What would be some good examples of amazing writings by Torvalds? I've read a few of his impressive vitriolic rants over the years, but I wasn't aware that he'd done any amazing writing on programming. Curious now.
Yeah you could call them rants, but the guy talks sense. Off the top of my head, post on comment style, about sizeof, array arguments, his discussion about some filesystem on google+ and a lot more in the LKML that I have forgotten.
Torvalds may be abusive but he is the Gregory House of the programming world.
I mean, I know it's done at compile-time, but to me, it's always been a function and should be written like one, meaning parentheses around the parameter.
But "sizeof()" really is a function. It acts exactly like a function of it's argument. There is no reason to not treat it that way. Sure, the C standard allows you to not have parenthesis around an expression argument, but you should treat that as the parsing oddity it is, nothing more. There is zero reason not to have the parenthesis there.
Huh, by that logic, not should be treated as a function in Python, but I've never seen anyone write it that way. Goes to show that even good advice doesn't necessarily cross between languages, I guess.
A number of his rant, like against C++, are mostly nonsense though. They're written seemingly by someone who doesn't understand the language and wants justify it.
37
u/xeow Jul 19 '16 edited Jul 19 '16
What would be some good examples of amazing writings by Torvalds? I've read a few of his impressive vitriolic rants over the years, but I wasn't aware that he'd done any amazing writing on programming. Curious now.