The curse of the gifted programmer (ESR's email to Torvalds)

The curse of the gifted programmer is apparently the need to deal with occasional direct emails from Eric Raymond.

This line of ESR's<p>&#62; As Linux grows, there will come a time when your raw talent is not enough.<p>is the key bit.<p>...and I think it was proven true several years back, when Linus found it increasing hard to keep on top of dealing with the inflow of bug fixes, patches, features, etc.<p>Raw talent is never enough for the really big problems. <i>Proper</i> use of routines and procedures are a brain amplifying technology.

We saw this earlier this month: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167754" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1167754</a>

Eric Raymond comes off patronizing with his "listen to grandpa" bit. He shrouds his argument in a weird "Unix tradition" argument, and appeals to heritage, culture and other nonsense as if computing was his village and he the elder.

(2000)

The general point that sooner or later raw ability won't carry someone is worthwhile.<p>I am curious whether splitting drivers early is a symptom of this.<p>I've personally seen too much code sharing as a more symptom of hubris than too little code sharing.

Why link to a loose copy?<p>why not the hundreds of mailing list archive where you can read the prequel, or the followup?

ESR doesn't have a clue.<p>Linus has at least two to rub together.<p>Why do you quote ESR as though he's some demi-god? He's a freak who takes credit for other people's work without so much as a citation.

ESR is wrong, Linus is right. The letter should be read in context, and it demonstrates the blunder of ESR.<p>Here is Linus' letter on which ESR responded: <a href="http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0201.html" rel="nofollow">http://lkml.indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/0008.2/0201.h...</a><p>And here are Linus' points, in short: <a href="http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/12" rel="nofollow">http://lkml.org/lkml/2000/8/22/12</a>