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Measuring code quality is always fraught with issues. That said, I could imagine that code bases that allow for swearing generally have a more honest and open c
by guitarbill 4y ago
Measuring code quality is always fraught with issues. That said, I could imagine that code bases that allow for swearing generally have a more honest and open communication culture, so swearing may be an indirect indicator of this. Which may be a better explanation than the hypothesis that "the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process."
- Ma8ee 4y agoYes, projects were the contributors care about their projects. Corporations rarely allow swear words in their code bases.
- twawaaay 4y agoYou are under impressions that corporations care about code in any way. They don't. They only care about business outcomes. If you mention "code quality" they will just stare at you. It is better to talk about "maintainability" or "development velocity" etc. It is teams/team managers who care about code quality. It is people who work at corporations that self-censor themselves to keep the professional look of themselves. I have never had any corporation disallow me from swearing in the codebase.
- Ma8ee 4y agoNo, the opposite. People who care use swear words. Corporations neither care or allow swear words.
- bawolff 4y agoWell that sounds plausible, it seems like we could come up with all sorts of stories to say basically anything here. Maybe swear words keep other contributors away, resulting in smaller dev teams that can have more consistent standards.
- ordu 4y agoWell, your hypothesis is easy to check, one needs to repeat the study controlling for a dev team size. It would be harder to measure culture's openness and honesty.