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Note this is a correlation analysis. Before draw any causal effect between the result and Developers' identity, the data itself may include bias. To give an ex

Note this is a correlation analysis. Before draw any causal effect between the result and Developers' identity, the data itself may include bias. To give an example of possible bias that totally not related to developers' identity. From Figure 3.9 and Figure 3.10, Softwipe scores over LoC have a very different pattern from star-repos, which could be: If whether a developer uses swearwords is statistically independent, then a project with more contributors are more likely includes swearwords. More contributors may correlate with having a coding style guide which has causal effect on the score from SoftWipe tool (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89495-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89495-8). Be careful when trying to explain data :)

comfypotato 4y ago
Came here to say this. I wouldn’t be surprised if swearing codebases are better in open source, but I would be surprised if swearing in your codebase makes it better. (This paper only works to prove the former not the latter.) The obvious traditional opinion is that swearing indicates a lack of intelligence and therefore worse code. I’m just saying that this is on the front page because it’s spicy (the naively-inferred causation goes against the traditional intuition).