While reviewing pull requests, Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel, has been focusing on grammar, particularly the overuse of the passive voice. He believes that using active voice leads to clearer and more concise communication.
Picture this. A developer submits a patch to improve the kernel's performance, only to be met with the scornful gaze of Linux chieftain Linus Torvalds , who declares:"Ah, but your participle is dangling! How do you expect the kernel to thrive under such conditions?"
"Would that I had established a style guide prior to this process," muses the supremo, slipping into the pluperfect subjunctive mood, a place of regrets where few happy things dwell. OK, that's not exactly what happened, but the imaginary dialog made us laugh. We started imagining the exchange after spotting Torvalds getting a bit worked up over grammaron the Linux Kernel Mailing List. He was lambasting the grammatical rather than the coding syntax of contributors. The problem? Devs' use of the passive voice.
Not unfairly, he noted that he tries to make his merge commit messages"cohesive" by editing the pull request language to"match a more standard layout and language." He added:"It's not a big deal, and often it's literally just about whitespace so that we don't have 15 different indentation models and bullet syntaxes." . So I would ask maintainers to please use active voice, and preferably just imperative.
Illustrating the point, and showing how far the Linux kernel chieftain has come from his more belligerent days, Torvalds said he'd"love it" if people would avoid writing their"descriptions as 'In this pull request, the Xyzzy driver error handling was fixed to avoid a NULL pointer dereference.' Instead, write it as 'This fixes a NULL pointer dereference in ..
Linus Torvalds Linux Kernel Grammar Passive Voice Active Voice
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