alt Hacker NewsTheory: the shift towards lesser swearwords is a sign of corporatization, making the linux source a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.
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TIL: Politeness makes one soulless.
I don't personally care if a swear word appears in code, but I do care if I offend others with my use of swear words. So, I try to limit their use to circumstances where offense is unlikely. Work is rarely such a place, particularly with shared resources like code. I might swear in a 1-on-1 conversation at work, but I definitely don't drop swear words into documents that unknown people might see. That's just basic professionalism.
I have never worked on a big corporation. But I find interesting about corporations forbidding swearwords in code. I mean, the people responsible for forbidding swearwords rarely read code. And if they read code with any frequency and are somewhat proficient at it, most likely they have their own list of swearwords.
Also we should look to add more keywords to programming languages that trigger naïve filters. I'm all in for another era of broken censorship to poke fun at the people who know nothing, but always have an opinion.
Hopefully in a few decades the last of the people who think that using respectful discourse means no fun can be had will be gone and we can stop rehashing these threads.
You're contributing to something that runs on billions of devices across the world and is maintained by people around the world of all types. If you can't describe your code, your reasons, and your notes politely, do better.
At a previous company, legend had it that swear words in code were banned because of an incident. A vendor was called in to debug a platform error which led to a code review. In the code reviewed, there were many expletives cussing out the vendor for undocumented behavior in their platform.
I feel as though it also represents the fact that contributors are less invested in the project. There was a small study done a few years back hypothesizing that the number of swear words related somewhat to code quality [0] due to emotional involvement of the codebase authors. I can imagine this to be somewhat true. I would love to see this study redone now that LLMs are widespread on pre chatgpt repos (as I suspect that repos created using LLMs are going to be very sanitised).
theory: the amount of crap is increasing. the number of fucks given are decreasing.
Strange to make such a point based on what you expect to happen when clicking on the link would immediately show the opposite to be the case. But I guess you didn’t need to do that bc you already “knew” the swear words would fall?
They went up, actually. "crap" skyrocketed in the last years, and the rest were more or less stable.
> a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.
I'll never understand this mentality. It's code, not some """self-expressionist""" art project.
Or a proxy for how many Americans work on the code. Maybe search the mailing list for occurrences of “inappropriate”.
Not that this not-Yankee has much of a need to swear in public to feel Free.
> , but I definitely don't drop swear words into documents that unknown people might see. That's just basic professionalism.
If you look at he numbers then the kernel was never all that swear-heavy.
68 instances of "fuck" at the peak in 2005, in how many million lines of code? And turns out 24 of those were in repeated instances of "IOC3 is fucking fucked" in the MIPS driver, so at least some of it is fairly "clustered" too.
The constant use of the same two swear words shows a boring lack of imagination.
They just use fewer, but still write disparaging things about their peers if that's what you want.
But also a bit more reliable.
> bland hellscape of conformity
I see three reasons to use swearwords sparingly, even though they don’t particularly offend me.
1 Managing my own emotions. Most swearing is negative and that drags you down which is not very productive or fun.
2 Managing others‘ emotions as they burst out, which stresses the people around the swearer.
3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which makes them sound fucking stupid.