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Linus Torvalds In Sweary Rant About Punctuation In Kernel Comments (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by msmash on from the how-to-write-comments dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report on The Register: Linus Torvalds has unleashed a sweary rant on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, labelling some members "brain-damaged" for their preferred method of punctuating comments. "Can we please get rid of the brain-damaged stupid networking comment syntax style, PLEASE?" the Linux Lord asked last Friday. "If the networking people cannot handle the pure awesomeness that is a balanced and symmetric traditional multi-line C style comments, then instead of the disgusting unbalanced crap that you guys use now, please just go all the way to the C++ mode."Torvalds despises the following two comment-punctuation styles (with his comments):/* This is disgusting drug-induced
* crap, and should die
*/ and:/* This is also very nasty
* and visually unbalanced */Torvalds prefers the following two styles:/* This is a comment */ and:/*
* This is also a comment, but it can now be cleanly
* split over multiple lines
*/

8 of 523 comments (clear)

  1. Linus the man-child by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    What happened in his childhood to arrest his development? Any shrinks in the house?

    1. Re:Linus the man-child by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 4, Interesting

      “Luck Is What Happens When Preparation Meets Opportunity" - Seneca

      If you're not prepared for opportunity, and someone else is, you call them "lucky". Probably because you were too busy with Pokemon Go!

      --
      Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
  2. Re:Arguing over the subjective by sunderland56 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I both heartily agree with him, and think he's a crackpot. If you're trying to attract unpaid people to work on a project, this isn't the way to do it.

    // and, for the record, who uses c-style comments any more?
    // haven't written one in years
    // double-slash comments are the one and only improvement that c++ gave us

  3. Re:I don't use comments by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In the real world, "learning some other guy's code base" sometimes would indeed take more time than rewriting it the first chance you get.

  4. Re:Whom The Gods Destroy... by perpenso · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ...they first cause comment syntax to twist their panties into a bunch.

    Huh, I thought it was tabs vs spaces first, comment formatting second.

    80 character lines.

    I thought we all agreed to set our terminal windows to 120 characters?

  5. Many things are worse than bad comment punctuation by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Worst comments are obsolete comments. The comment described what that function was designed to do, some 8 years ago. It has morphed since, default arguments added, the list has been replaced by multimap which was replaced by hashmap completely changing the behavior, and still the comments have not been updated.

    Next worst are ego comments. Every inline function preceded by three line comment naming the author as though he is Leo Tolstoy or she is Jane Austen.

    Next worst are trivial comments. Next worst are no comments.

    Then comes badly formatted comments.

    --
    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  6. Re:40 column mode by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    many of us have worked on devices where EVERY byte of memory was a scarce resource. comments generally only live in source not binary but I had code where I even had to remove error handling to save a few bytes of memory in an EDI system.

  7. Re:Arguing over the subjective by Jeremiah+Cornelius · · Score: 2, Interesting


    THIS is an ANUS:
    *

    THIS is an ANUS on SLASHDOT:
    *
    /.

    --
    "Flyin' in just a sweet place,
    Never been known to fail..."