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 nor is it a far-fetched scenario. Torvalds was getting into it on Sunday night on the Linux Kernel Mailing List, 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.)
The Linux kernel creator then revealed his current bugbear, which, we might add, is similar to that of many an editor in the tech and science news game – use of the passive voice.
Grammatical errors in the post itself notwithstanding (Muphry's law is axiomatic in this type of post, and likely also in this article describing it), The Reg thinks Torvalds is correct. The passive construction, which is overwhelmingly used in scientific papers and by many a technical writer, can be confusing and annoying, with an ensuing lack of clarity that leads not only to confusion about responsibility or agency, but often hides important information about who should be doing what and when. Ideal for certain vendor manuals, then.
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The Linux supremo declared:
Illustrating the point, and showing how far the Linux kernel chieftain has come from his more belligerent days, Torvalds said he'd "love it" (yep, he's a new man) 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 ..'"
The directive comes years after the great punctuation rant of 2016, where Torvalds pressed "brain-damaged shit-for-brains devs" to drop the "disgusting drug-induced crap" and use asterisks properly. He's toned it down several notches, basically.
So there you have it, folks. Simple ambiguity-killing declarative sentences or imperative phrases – you can't beat 'em. ®