Treating people poorly isn’t a quirk of nerd culture. Even Linus doesn’t think so.

> This is my reality. I am not an emotionally empathetic kind of person and that probably doesn't come as a big surprise to anybody. Least of all me. The fact that I then misread people and don't realize (for years) how badly I've judged a situation and contributed to an unprofessional environment is not good.

> This week people in our community confronted me about my lifetime of not understanding emotions. My flippant attacks in emails have been both unprofessional and uncalled for.

> Especially at times when I made it personal. In my quest for a better patch, this made sense to me. I know now this was not OK and I am truly sorry. The above is basically a long-winded way to get to the somewhat painful personal admission that hey, I need to change some of my behavior, and I want to apologize to the people that my personal behavior hurt and possibly drove away from kernel development entirely.

> I am going to take time off and get some assistance on how to understand people's emotions and respond appropriately.

And he walked the walk. He became better after that. Linux is a better project for it. But I suppose it did influence a generation of people in software who looked up to Linus and thought this is the correct way to treat people you perceive as beneath you.

But it is very common. I was watching a YouTube video by Casey Muratori where he says anyone using a garbage collected language is stupid and just not a good programmer! Just like that he offended 95% of our industry. He even said people who use smart pointers are just beginners and haven’t learned the true ways yet, offending the remaining 5%. And this sort of comment and people supporting those opinions are extremely common!