Torvalds' Folly

Read this message on the subject of C++ as a programming language from Linus Torvalds.
To give you a little context, this is the git mailing list (or rather, newsgroup) which is the revision control system they chose after all the controversy around BitKeeper (which was proprietary and not at all suitable for the Linux kernel.)
Torvalds and others are developing git from ground up and they have opted to use C as opposed to C++. This message here is Torvalds going medieval on some guy because he suggested that they could start using C++ features to make their software better.
He even mentions STL and Boost as samples of bad C++! This is not the first time I've seen him act like this (not the opinion, but the behavior) which might be expected from someone who has zero time for newbies, but the opinion. Man, is he wrong! He just doesn't understand that a language is just as good as the programmer. He seems not to realize the "zero-overhead" rule of the C++ language: that no feature of the language has any runtime overhead when not used.
Anyway, I knew Torvalds was a bad leader (because of his attitude towards free software (as opposed to merely open-source software)) but I still counted him as a brilliant programmer and engineer. I guess we cannot rule out the "engineer" part, because of the evidence in the form of the kernel, but the "programmer" part has become under a dark cloud in my mind.