For anyone who didn't recognize it, that's a reference to Orwell's Newspeak (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak). Which makes me wonder about two things:

- is Linus hinting that he is censoring himself, and if he wasn't, what expression would he have used instead?

- for what kind of incident does he reserve the attribute "double plus ungood"? Probably if such a bug would get into the production kernel?

You’re reading way too much into it - it’s just a colourful expression.

Anyway, “double ungood” would not be a valid Newspeak construction. The base is “good” and “ungood” is the negation; intensification would be “plusungood” and further intensification “doubleplusungood”.

> ... if he wasn't, what expression would he have used instead?

My first guess would be something that includes the word "fuck"... but, on second thought, this isn't Nvidia -- so perhaps not.

I think that the word ‘Double ungood’ was generated by his auto correction program which automatically replaces all the swear words with some less offensive words

I can recall a colleague, many years ago, sometimes using "doubleplusungood", often shortened -- in (typical lazy UNIX admin style -- to just

  ++ungood

Later, another cow-orker tried using a slight variant ...

  ++!good

... although that one never really caught on -- apparently it didn't compile or something (maybe because we were using Red Hat's version "2.96" of gcc at the time?).

--

(+10 Internet points if you get the reference(s))

++ can't operate on !good because it's not an lvalue (i.e. not assignable).

    typedef double winston;
    winston smith(int good) { return (double)+!good; }

Oops, sorry for giving it away in my comment ;)

It's okay, that's not the only one!

In my view seeing him writing double ungood worries me.

Don't need to swear, but he could have written "very bad" or something like that.