Linus Torvalds declares war on the passive voice
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 grammar on Sunday night on 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." (It would seem Torvalds is on the uniformity team of the tabs vs spaces debate.)
