What Linus (Torvalds, the Linux Dude) Meant by "Show Me the Code"
"Mythos is bluster, but functions well in regard to harvesting VC money. That is its only deliverable. A lot of normal people however have gotten quite frighted by not knowing enough and actually believing the hype." -Techrights associate
This is slop about slop!
When did fuzzing too get rebranded as "hey hi"?
"Show Me the Code" is a common cultural reference that predates Torvalds and is said/uttered aloud a lot at offices, not necessarily sarcastically, sometimes casually and nonchalantly (if not assertively).
When you show your code you assume it is shown to someone who can understand it (i.e. not Torvalds and many of his most important co-developers in Linux). A person with neither understanding nor care will just assess quantity (shallowly, visually), not quality or substance.
With his Swedish/Finnish sense of humour and cultural background, when Linus says "show me the code" he might be only partly joking; he's just not interested in all the talking or the dumb social control media gossip or pronouns; he just wants to make sure the code works, and works as advertised. Everything is connected, not fully insulated, so any defect in one piece of code can impact other parts of the program (problems emerge at the binary level). The Swedes know a thing or two about how to make things explode; they named a prize after it (Nobel).
Now that many so-called 'greybeards' (stigma with a negative connotation for experienced, knowledgeable developers who understand the risk of bloat, technical debt, and immature/amateur code) insist on auditing code and generally turn down slop ("vibe coding" is merely a toy, for "entertainment purposes" rather than integration into projects; prototyping is another matter) we're meant to perceive code's quality assurance (QA) as a negative thing which reduces so-called 'productivity'. As one blogger called it last month, this is "subprime technical debt"; we're allowing some idiotic managers to contaminate codebases with lines of code that are neither tagged (as slop) nor tested, which kicks the inevitable problems down the road for a while longer (until slop outweighs "real code" and causes problems nobody can properly diagnose, fix, or refactor away).
Many headlines in corporate media have heralded with foolish excitement that Torvalds - increasingly pressured by the Linux Foundation (bribed by slop companies to play along) - will permit slop to get integrated into Linux. This will not end well, just wait and watch. █