Good points. In my personal categorisation system, the people who endlessly discuss about brace style or system A being better then system B without either of them having any hard advantages over the other get the label 'religious zealots'. Also, while the amount of 'asshole-ness' in a character may be orthogonal to the quality of being a good programmer, I know no one personally who I would describe as a 'productive asshole', and I only ever had to deal with 2 or 3 true A-quality 'destructive assholes' in my whole carrier.
The thesis is that Torvalds is one such 'productive asshole'. Do you have any way to tell if someone is an asshole, assuming asshole-ness is mostly orthagonal to productivity? http://www.vice.com/read/orson-scott-card-is-officially-the-... describes Card as "a complete asshole and an unrepentant homophobe", and Card is a a productive and successful SF writer, so could also fall into the same category.
It's hard to read about women doing scientific research 100 years ago without thinking that most of their male colleagues were assholes in how they treated women.
It's really unfortunate that all open source discussions don't go like the discussion I just read between the two of you. It sure would be nice if that were the case.
