33 ms·

Open source code with profanity in comments is statistically better

292 points by dev_snd 3y ago

dev_snd 3y ago
Here's the link to the original full PDF: https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf
version_five 3y ago
I remember reading that people who swear a lot are statistically smarter. I'm sure there are lots of caveats to that, as with the code. How long will it be before someone who doesn't understand causality starts encouraging developers to write profane comments? It wouldn't be any more absurd than lots of other non-causal behaviors I've seen pushed because somebody successful does them.
- davely 3y ago
  There is probably some cognitive overhead required to actually not swear in certain situations, especially if you’re prone to doing it. “What the f… heck is this, kiddo?” Definitely gotta utilize those brain wrinkles in that case.
- LeifCarrotson 3y ago
  Failing to provide the typical social signals seems correlated either with extreme competence - they don't need to use polite language or other signals to boost employability - or with complete incompetence. There's a skill floor that cuts off the latter from this dataset when they can't configure an SSL certificate for their git client; their curses at "unable to get local issuer certificate" or "fatal: repository not found" are not uploaded to the Internet.
- ahamm 3y ago
  I believe Nassim Taleb wrote about this in relation to 'virtue signaling' - not swearing being a sign that people are trying to 'signal' professionalism in order to keep their jobs, and therefore are more likely to have less actual professional skills (which if good enough would secure their jobs regardless of profanity) and vice-versa. Same for hoodies over ties, etc. Although all this probably gets flipped now that we have people writing papers like this - context is everything.
  - halkony 3y ago
    Do you remember where he wrote about that? Sounds like something in Antifragile, but let's be honest, any one of his books is better called a corpus.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  > I remember reading that people who swear a lot are statistically smarter. I'd need more evidence of that. My anecdotal experience is that saying "fuck" a lot is indicative of a lack of imagination. For example, Winston Churchill's legendary devastating insults, with no profanity necessary.
mikecoles 3y ago
My code, by twisting this finding, is bug-free.
paxys 3y ago
I'd first like to know how they judged what is "good" vs "bad" code.
bawolff 3y ago
I'd bet a lot of the non-profanity code is people open sourcing code just to be impressive on resumes or for school, where the profanity code is probably real code. Sounds likely to be a classic case of correlation != causation
- MoSattler 3y ago
  So, you're saying that my code won't improve simply by sprinkling F-Bombs everywhere?
  - bawolff 3y ago
    Correct: fork bombs rarely help
  - passwordoops 3y ago
    There's only one way to find out!
  - mikrl 3y ago
    The C code so impressive they had to remove it from K&R: if (*some_bullshit >= shit_tolerance){ fucks_given = 0; exit(IM_DONE); }
    - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
      Why bother setting fucks_given if you're exiting? mmm /embeddedme says it could be a memory-mapped peripheral that needs to be reset on exit. But that's a stretch. Why am I even thinking about this?
- zitterbewegung 3y ago
  I would bet the opposite because I can make a blind assertion.
  - bawolff 3y ago
    You're beting that people swear in code in order to impress future employers?
KolmogorovComp 3y ago
Correlation is not causality. Swearing in the comments will not magically make your code better, but fixing a hidden bugs that you have been chasing for weeks will certainly make you swear when fixed.
- bitofhope 3y ago
  Sounds like you're suggesting a causal relationship the other way, though. As per this explanation, putting effort into debugging edge cases will statistically cause the comments to swear more.
- fsckboy 3y ago
  > Correlation is not causality. I'm fond of pointing out, despite every time I get downvoted, that causation is the thing we have no knowledge of, and therefore correlation is all we have. As Feynman said about gravity, there is no how or why to gravity, as far as we know it's simply a property of matter. But of course, that means we only know that because of the perfect correlation between matter and gravity, including every time we conduct an experiment about it; but still we have no cause to point to.
  - WalterBright 3y ago
    Maybe gravity causes matter.
    - fsckboy 3y ago
      gravitas matters, if you will ;)
  - danans 3y ago
    While that may be the case, the correlation coefficient of matter and gravity is so close to 1 that we can't tell the difference and the correlation coefficient of swearing in code to good code is far less.
  - dash2 3y ago
    A reasonable working definition of causality, used by almost all scientists today, is that X causes Y if a change in X, unaccompanied by any other change, changes Y. At root, this is indeed a statement about correlations, but it's a special kind of correlation, which is hard to estimate from observational data where many other things may change along with X.
andrewedstrom 3y ago
I'm sure the top comment here will be something like "this is invalid because no way can you assign a numerical value to code quality! wtf?!" I'm withholding my own judgement on that. For anyone curious, the authors are coming up with a code quality score using an open-source tool called SoftWipe[0]. From the paper: > SoftWipe is an open source tool and benchmark to assess, rate, and review scientific software written in C or C++ with respect to coding standard adherence. The coding standard adherence is assessed using a set of static and dynamic code analysers such as Lizard (https://github.com/terryyin/lizard https://github.com/terryyin/lizard) or the Clang address sanitiser (https: //clang.llvm.org/). It returns a score between 0 (low adherence) and 10 (good adherence). In order to simplify our experimental setup, we excluded the compilation warnings, which require a difficult to automate compilation of the assessed software, from the analysis using the --exclude-compilation option. [0]: https://github.com/adrianzap/softwipe https://github.com/adrianzap/softwipe
- jtbayly 3y ago
  The obvious question is whether the source code for this tool has profanity in it…
jansommer 3y ago
I sometimes feel like swearing in the comments or commit messages, which can be the first thought coming to mind, and spend a few resources on writing in a kinder way. Perhaps I could use this as an excuse for not reaching a deadline...
vharuck 3y ago
Possible explanation: swearing is more likely to be committed into code by people who either (1) own the code, or (2) know they're too valuable to be punished. So it self-selects. I personally have very different commenting styles between my work and personal projects. Not that any of it's good.
- moffkalast 3y ago
  Possible explanation: The code for the fast inv sqrt is copy pasted everywhere and is skewing the results.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Imo, it's because swearing indicates frustration, and frustration indicates effort.
  - throwaway8689 3y ago
    So I need to use more profanity at work, then ask for a raise? (But I concede that effort and productivity are not the same thing.)
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Or as Good to Great calls it, "Confronting the brutal facts". "This is bullshit" is an important realization. If you can't say it, then things will stay miserable.
- monksy 3y ago
  Alternative explanation in the same vane as your theory: The cognitive and time cost of compliance for language policing takes away from valuable programming and planning involved in developing solutions. (i.e. "banned words" [swear words] and politicalized words [whitelist/blacklist,etc]) Antoher possibility is the people who don't want to deal with that are gone and we're seeing a loss of their contributions.
  - Forgeties79 3y ago
francasso 3y ago
This is an example where correlation does imply causation IMHO
- grayhatter 3y ago
  The author of the paper suggests it's because the author of the code cares more, and is more passionate. Do you think it's just random chance there is a correlation, or do you have a better explanation for the results?
- ftxbro 3y ago
  adding swears into codebases would improve their quality
twodave 3y ago
Article should have included some juicy examples. 4/10
moonchrome 3y ago
Being passionate about code correlates with quality - shocking
betamike 3y ago
I skimmed the paper, and it looks like they are looking for swearing _anywhere_ in the repos' code, not just comments. I would be curious to see the ratio of swearing in comments vs code identifiers. I'd also be curious to see if the repos with swearing in their comments just have more comments in total. Perhaps the correlation is, "code with more comments is more likely to be higher quality".
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  Swearing in the comments is for goodie goodies. Bad assed programmers swear in public apis like class names, functions, variables, and documentation!
  - blarghyblarg 3y ago
    The best programmers I've worked with swore at their coworkers regularly, but never in their code. They were not great people, and I'd happily kick them in the face if I would encounter no legal or professional repercussions, but, there definitely does seem to be some correlation (in my experience) between being abrasive and being a skilled programmer.
    - ftxbro 3y ago
      apotheosis in terry davis
      - blarghyblarg 3y ago
        RIP. Likely the Platonic Ideal of an abrasive programmer. I'd put mid 00s Linus Torvalds as the apotheosis. Despite being an incredibly abrasive person, he has left a mark on history.
    - paxys 3y ago
      Coworkers who swear are just more memorable. Plenty of great ones quietly get the job done without a fuss and without seeking to always cause a scene.
bjornsing 3y ago
Sure, that means someone cares.
z3t4 3y ago
Or that those that need to adhere to strict linters, formatting, etc are less happy with their life and thus use more profanity. eg. "code quality" tools that does not have any benefits besides finding potential bugs that does not effect the state of the program, like lines that are 71 characters long instead of 70 characters.
whoopdedo 3y ago
From the research paper: > we calculate the swear factor as the number of swearwords divided by the lines of code That's what I suspected. Assuming that most swear words will be contained in comments, what this is actually measuring is the ratio of comments to code. In other words, code that is more heavily commented is better. I think we already knew this. That said I would like to see a more critical analysis. First control for comment density. Then compare code quality to swearing in comments and also variable names.
- mr_00ff00 3y ago
  Isn’t commented code no longer considered a good idea in most companies? I used to work for a bank and the policy is no comments unless absolutely necessary, because comments become out of date. Doxygen is the only real comments allowed.
  - almet 3y ago
    I'm not sure the ratio of comments to LoC is a sign of good quality code. Too many comments might actually be a bad thing. It's more lines to maintain, and sometimes the comments just tell what the code is doing where there is no need to.
    - brazzledazzle 3y ago
      I find that comments are most valuable when onboarding/understanding an unfamiliar code base. Comments composed of a little bit of “what” some “where” and a lot of “why” seems best for this scenario.
  - makeworld 3y ago
    Wow, that seems strange to me. Seems like the policy should be to make comments when needed, and keep them up to date.
  - paxys 3y ago
    That's an idiotic policy and definitely not something that is industry standard. Code gets out of date as well, so let's just stop writing it altogether..
skrebbel 3y ago
My pet theory is that this is because honest, emotional comments are much more useful than the usual “professional” style that try to hide it when you have no clue what you’re doing. When it’s clear someone was stuck, frustrated, banging their head against the wall etc while writing a particular bit of code, you can refactor a lot less defensively because you know the crappy parts weren’t secretly there for a reason. I love real, honest, emotional comments. Pour all the frustration in there. Future you and your colleagues will thank you.
- jamesgreenleaf 3y ago
  I think so too. Profanity, in small amounts, is an indicator of honesty. Everyone swears sometimes. If you never do it in front of others, it signals that you're always filtering yourself.
sircastor 3y ago
Anecdotally, it seems to me that I work with a lot of folks that swear frequently but not in their code comments.
yk 3y ago
> Next, Strehmel and his team quantified the compliance of these two different sets of open source code with coding standards. The results were presented as an indicator of the quality of the source code through the SoftWipe tool. I would read that study as coding standards lead to profanity. (Not sure wether or not coding standards should be correlated with code quality, I just think it is obvious that the measure is correlated with the conclusion in an obvious way.) [Post posting:] Also looking at the plots, it seems that the two distributions are different, first the swear word distribution seems to be wider and second it has a clear outlier at "software quality" 8, so if anything it is an indication that something much more complex is going on.
ydnaclementine 3y ago
One rule I live by is I never ever swear in comments or commits, just not worth it. Even in personal projects. But one of my favorite projects to ctrl-f for "fuck" is in the jedi outcast source code. Since it is proprietary and was a good game: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agrayj%2FJedi-Outcast+fuck&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agrayj%2FJedi-Outcast+fuck...
- arp242 3y ago
  > But one of my favorite projects to ctrl-f for "fuck" is in the jedi outcast source code. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_b2B5tKBUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_b2B5tKBUM
- evilotto 3y ago
  I'm guessing the multiple instances of i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); in the results are one of those inverse-square floating point bit tricks.
- mike_hock 3y ago
  > Sign in to search code on GitHub lolwat
alpaca128 3y ago
> Much of the community considers profanity as a vulgar display of lack of intelligence and education, because why use profanity when you have a rich vocabulary? Why not use the full range of one's vocabulary?
- bregma 3y ago
  Ten thousand bilious blue blistering barnacles that's a tremendous idea! Or by "full range" did you mean "limit it to a few well-worn cliches"?
coding123 3y ago
in other words, it increases the chance that the programmer is in a specific locale (like the US?) such that the location has less bad programmers than other locations. And probably, increases the chance that the person is fed up with fixing someone else's code - hence the anger
twodave 3y ago
The best CS professor I ever had always said that the #1 language among programmers is profanity.
saintradon 3y ago
Isn't there a study that shows that people can tolerate pain better when they swear? This doesn't really surprise me. I'll swear in my code if I really feel like it but commits and everything else I keep more presentable.
- pyeri 3y ago
  It's just that you've evolved biological filters that "block" the swearing from getting voiced out as being presentable takes the priority? The way our society is progressing right now, such evolution seems to be the direction that we all will take eventually.
pyeri 3y ago
Probably same goes about the people? The emotionally charged person that swears and gives a mouthful usually ACTS better than the cold calculated one that speaks the right words but full of cunning inside?
ftxbro 3y ago
now we let goodhart's take its course
pak9rabid 3y ago
// fuckin eh
BizarreByte 3y ago
I find it a bit suspect swearing would ever even get though a proper code review. It’s extremely unprofessional, I would tell someone to remove it.
- MacsHeadroom 3y ago
  And this is precisely how language policing slows down technical progress.
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    No, this is why you should be a professional. Swearing doesn’t belong in your employers codebase, it’s tasteless, looks bad, and may age very, very poorly.
- KerrAvon 3y ago
  you're from the east coast, aren't you?
  - klysm 3y ago
    At least in New England we swear quite a bit I’m not sure on what basis you are making that accusation
  - BizarreByte 3y ago
    I’m not from America at all.
- klysm 3y ago
  What harm does it cause?
scns 3y ago
Reminds me of a study. It showed, that swearing enables you to tolerate pain better. It was simple. Two groups, both had to put their hands into ice water. The group that was allowed to swear could do it longer. I'd hypothesize, that programmers, who actually care about quality, swear more. Individuals with AD(H)D might have a have a lower tolerance to pain. This, coupled with wide open sensual channels and decreased impulse control, might be a contributing factor. [Edit] added parenthesis and link Not correlated to swearing, but AD(H)D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdT4DIiX7Nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdT4DIiX7Nk
- mpweiher 3y ago
  > I'd hypothesize, that programmers, who actually care about quality, swear more. Ding ding ding, I think we have a winner! If you're not moved to profanity by most code-bases, you're either not paying attention or don't understand.
yodsanklai 3y ago
I'm surprised this is still a thing. I suppose this is associated with "toxic masculinity" which is frowned upon nowadays. I'm always a bit worried that I forget to edit my swearing and that it goes to code review.
yongjik 3y ago
Sorry for being off topic, but let me introduce you to the only true metric of code quality: WTF/minute. https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/ https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/ One wonders if profanity in the source code interferes with reviewers and skews this important metric ...
charonn0 3y ago
I only swear in commit messages. Am I doing it wrong?
OnlyMortal 3y ago
Fuck that code!
fnordpiglet 3y ago
When we open sourced the Netscape Navigator a major undertaking was code sanitation. This including excising licensed libraries etc (resulting in an initial release that wasn’t able to compile), but also removing enormous amounts of profanity and references to how evil Microsoft was.
- DonHopkins 3y ago
  JWZ sure could flame in the comments, especially about Motif. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif....
aosmith 3y ago
This is a normal part of software... You find something really bad, git blame says it's your own, you leave a vulgar comment about how bad it is for the next guy.
helmsb 3y ago
Correlation ≠ Causation
DonHopkins 3y ago
The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ): https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emacs/lisp/ChangeLog.3 https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac... 1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu) * terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el. https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/terminal.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... [...] ;; disgusting unix-required shit ;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet? (defun te-losing-unix () nil) [...] ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.) ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control... (defun te-process-output (preemptable) ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption (setq preemptable t) [...] ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate ;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals ;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin) [...] (?\C-b . te-backward-char) ;; should be C-d, but un*x ;; pty's won't send \004 through! ;; Can you believe this? [...] ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters? ;; I don't remember doing so, either. ;; (Perhaps some operating system or ;; other is completely incompetent...) [...] ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean ;; o writing in the last column of the last line ;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte ;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall. "LP:NF:" ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :" ;;-- For disgusting programs. ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?) "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:"))) [...] (setq te-process (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer) "/bin/sh" "-c" ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal ;; control characteristics. Then start the ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type ;; Then finally start the program we wanted. (format "%s; exec %s" te-stty-string (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh (cons program args) " "))))) [...] ;;;; what a complete loss [...] https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/term-nasty.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik ;;; Commentary: ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were ;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it ;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US. ;; So we decided to put the comments here. ;;; Code: These comments were removed from te-losing-unix. ;(what lossage) ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char) This was before te-process-output. ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control... And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used: ;fuck me harder ;again and again! ;wa12id!! ;(spiked) ;;; term-nasty.el ends here Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo". Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty: https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m/xek-XhmQ9eoJ https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m... Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes: >In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes: >>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny. >Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful. (and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-)) Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19. Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original. Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors. In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was. -- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski
gweinberg 3y ago
I've noticed the same effect in HNN posts. The more profanity there is the comments, the better the original post! Unfortunately there's no good way to take advantage of this; optimizing to the metric destroys the value of the metric.
cjsplat 3y ago
While at Sun in the early 2000's, I was part of the due diligence team for an acquisition and had two days to review the entire code base of a 3 year old, 50 person software team. This was standard practice, and the M&A policies knew that there was no way to actually understand all the code so there was a policy document to describe what to look for. Of course the red flag things were unexpected 3rd party copyrights and/or license terms in case the code was encumbered. But "swear words" were on the yellow flag list, in addition to "ToDo", "XXXX", and "Fix Me" types of things. I remember thinking about places I have been in the past and that the people used those style comments tended to be the better programmers. I mentioned this to the person leading the evaluation, and was told that point of noticing these kinds of comments was to look a more closely at the nearby code and try to decide if major functionality was missing or being faked. It all worked out for that acquisition, but I remember being curious about whatever deal had gone bad in the distant past that made them codify this specific practice.
tsukikage 3y ago
"In 2018, Adam Farley, a contributor to the OpenJDK project, the presence of profanity in the source code." Someone accidentally a verb.
- koromak 3y ago
  "As part of your study, reviewed and analyzed over 3800 open source code containing profanity in English and over 7600 profanity-free open source code on GitHub." Wow, over 3800 code? Thats so many code! And its my study? Even better!
- jraph 3y ago
  They didn't their sentence. It makes it quite.
stainablesteel 3y ago
someone hired a team to review 10k repos just for this?
happytiger 3y ago
Fuck yea it is.
gridspy 3y ago
My Hypothesis 1. Passionate developers often swear more often when they feel safe to do so 2. Developers work better in a "safe environment" where they are not judged / forced to follow other guidelines by social or employment pressure. And another point : those places where it's unsafe (often due to managerial micromanagement) are miserable places to work. That can drive away skilled developers or suppress them if they remain. All this is assuming the research metric is real, though I'm not sure it is. If the metric for "code quality" is actually "precision following a coding standard" you'd have though that rigid adherence to procedure would lead to a higher score?
- l0b0 3y ago
  Absolutely. Passion and trust → swearing and quality.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    Fuckin'-A
danans 3y ago
I bet there are a lot of less visible but stronger correlations to code quality, including incentive structures, programmer time spent to code ratio, quality of tools, quality of documentation, etc. Swearing in code, however, is much easier to quantify, and of course chosen to chuff up those who think swearing itself is a virtue. It would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that allowing swearing in code will improve code quality.
pickingdinner 3y ago
Not to get too philosophical, but does profanity measure the children in the room, or does it measure the adults in the room? Schrodinger's chat (room).
ratel 3y ago
My favorite (almost) obscene quote I found reviewing code, although I never could find the back story to it: "Which idiot wrote this crap? You did! Which idiot hired me?" I think this also points to the statistical significance. Code that has been worked over a couple of times and/or has been worked on by different people for all those hard and fringe problems will be better, but also accumulate more comments venting the trouble people had fixing them. It does not seem very interesting.
makeitdouble 3y ago
An alternative take: Swearing was more abundant in the earlier days and the code that survived until today is probably better that what got lost along the way. In general the coding population has grown, we're more used to coding in corporate settings with code reviews, commit message processing etc. and the bulk of devs aren't just as emotional in writing their comments (some will still swear like sailors, but it's not the norm) > The study relied solely on the source code written in C. This in particular, probably reduced the number of hobby and beginner's project in the study.
briantakita 3y ago
Until every fucking wanker who reads this article adds profanity to their shitty code expecting their bullshit to be better.
cozzyd 3y ago
Improve your C code with this one neat trick! #define fuck if #define shit else #define ass return
wjholden 3y ago
This story and the resulting discussion here on HN are such a great example of data mining with statistical methods. The researchers found a non-obvious result using statistics. Now we're all speculating about the underlying cause, trying to apply our domain knowledge to explain the result.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

292 points by dev_snd 3y ago

Here's the link to the original full PDF: https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf

version_five 3y ago

I remember reading that people who swear a lot are statistically smarter. I'm sure there are lots of caveats to that, as with the code. How long will it be before someone who doesn't understand causality starts encouraging developers to write profane comments? It wouldn't be any more absurd than lots of other non-causal behaviors I've seen pushed because somebody successful does them.

davely 3y ago
There is probably some cognitive overhead required to actually not swear in certain situations, especially if you’re prone to doing it. “What the f… heck is this, kiddo?” Definitely gotta utilize those brain wrinkles in that case.
LeifCarrotson 3y ago
Failing to provide the typical social signals seems correlated either with extreme competence - they don't need to use polite language or other signals to boost employability - or with complete incompetence. There's a skill floor that cuts off the latter from this dataset when they can't configure an SSL certificate for their git client; their curses at "unable to get local issuer certificate" or "fatal: repository not found" are not uploaded to the Internet.
ahamm 3y ago
I believe Nassim Taleb wrote about this in relation to 'virtue signaling' - not swearing being a sign that people are trying to 'signal' professionalism in order to keep their jobs, and therefore are more likely to have less actual professional skills (which if good enough would secure their jobs regardless of profanity) and vice-versa. Same for hoodies over ties, etc. Although all this probably gets flipped now that we have people writing papers like this - context is everything.
- halkony 3y ago
  Do you remember where he wrote about that? Sounds like something in Antifragile, but let's be honest, any one of his books is better called a corpus.
WalterBright 3y ago
> I remember reading that people who swear a lot are statistically smarter. I'd need more evidence of that. My anecdotal experience is that saying "fuck" a lot is indicative of a lack of imagination. For example, Winston Churchill's legendary devastating insults, with no profanity necessary.

mikecoles 3y ago

My code, by twisting this finding, is bug-free.

paxys 3y ago

I'd first like to know how they judged what is "good" vs "bad" code.

bawolff 3y ago

I'd bet a lot of the non-profanity code is people open sourcing code just to be impressive on resumes or for school, where the profanity code is probably real code. Sounds likely to be a classic case of correlation != causation

MoSattler 3y ago
So, you're saying that my code won't improve simply by sprinkling F-Bombs everywhere?
- bawolff 3y ago
  Correct: fork bombs rarely help
- passwordoops 3y ago
  There's only one way to find out!
- mikrl 3y ago
  The C code so impressive they had to remove it from K&R: if (*some_bullshit >= shit_tolerance){ fucks_given = 0; exit(IM_DONE); }
  - HeyLaughingBoy 3y ago
    Why bother setting fucks_given if you're exiting? mmm /embeddedme says it could be a memory-mapped peripheral that needs to be reset on exit. But that's a stretch. Why am I even thinking about this?
zitterbewegung 3y ago
I would bet the opposite because I can make a blind assertion.
- bawolff 3y ago
  You're beting that people swear in code in order to impress future employers?

KolmogorovComp 3y ago

Correlation is not causality. Swearing in the comments will not magically make your code better, but fixing a hidden bugs that you have been chasing for weeks will certainly make you swear when fixed.

bitofhope 3y ago
Sounds like you're suggesting a causal relationship the other way, though. As per this explanation, putting effort into debugging edge cases will statistically cause the comments to swear more.
fsckboy 3y ago
> Correlation is not causality. I'm fond of pointing out, despite every time I get downvoted, that causation is the thing we have no knowledge of, and therefore correlation is all we have. As Feynman said about gravity, there is no how or why to gravity, as far as we know it's simply a property of matter. But of course, that means we only know that because of the perfect correlation between matter and gravity, including every time we conduct an experiment about it; but still we have no cause to point to.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Maybe gravity causes matter.
  - fsckboy 3y ago
    gravitas matters, if you will ;)
- danans 3y ago
  While that may be the case, the correlation coefficient of matter and gravity is so close to 1 that we can't tell the difference and the correlation coefficient of swearing in code to good code is far less.
- dash2 3y ago
  A reasonable working definition of causality, used by almost all scientists today, is that X causes Y if a change in X, unaccompanied by any other change, changes Y. At root, this is indeed a statement about correlations, but it's a special kind of correlation, which is hard to estimate from observational data where many other things may change along with X.

andrewedstrom 3y ago

I'm sure the top comment here will be something like "this is invalid because no way can you assign a numerical value to code quality! wtf?!" I'm withholding my own judgement on that. For anyone curious, the authors are coming up with a code quality score using an open-source tool called SoftWipe[0]. From the paper: > SoftWipe is an open source tool and benchmark to assess, rate, and review scientific software written in C or C++ with respect to coding standard adherence. The coding standard adherence is assessed using a set of static and dynamic code analysers such as Lizard (https://github.com/terryyin/lizard https://github.com/terryyin/lizard) or the Clang address sanitiser (https: //clang.llvm.org/). It returns a score between 0 (low adherence) and 10 (good adherence). In order to simplify our experimental setup, we excluded the compilation warnings, which require a difficult to automate compilation of the assessed software, from the analysis using the --exclude-compilation option. [0]: https://github.com/adrianzap/softwipe https://github.com/adrianzap/softwipe

jtbayly 3y ago
The obvious question is whether the source code for this tool has profanity in it…

jansommer 3y ago

I sometimes feel like swearing in the comments or commit messages, which can be the first thought coming to mind, and spend a few resources on writing in a kinder way. Perhaps I could use this as an excuse for not reaching a deadline...

vharuck 3y ago

Possible explanation: swearing is more likely to be committed into code by people who either (1) own the code, or (2) know they're too valuable to be punished. So it self-selects. I personally have very different commenting styles between my work and personal projects. Not that any of it's good.

moffkalast 3y ago
Possible explanation: The code for the fast inv sqrt is copy pasted everywhere and is skewing the results.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
Imo, it's because swearing indicates frustration, and frustration indicates effort.
- throwaway8689 3y ago
  So I need to use more profanity at work, then ask for a raise? (But I concede that effort and productivity are not the same thing.)
- hinkley 3y ago
  Or as Good to Great calls it, "Confronting the brutal facts". "This is bullshit" is an important realization. If you can't say it, then things will stay miserable.
monksy 3y ago
Alternative explanation in the same vane as your theory: The cognitive and time cost of compliance for language policing takes away from valuable programming and planning involved in developing solutions. (i.e. "banned words" [swear words] and politicalized words [whitelist/blacklist,etc]) Antoher possibility is the people who don't want to deal with that are gone and we're seeing a loss of their contributions.
- Forgeties79 3y ago

francasso 3y ago

This is an example where correlation does imply causation IMHO

grayhatter 3y ago
The author of the paper suggests it's because the author of the code cares more, and is more passionate. Do you think it's just random chance there is a correlation, or do you have a better explanation for the results?
ftxbro 3y ago
adding swears into codebases would improve their quality

twodave 3y ago

Article should have included some juicy examples. 4/10

moonchrome 3y ago

Being passionate about code correlates with quality - shocking

betamike 3y ago

I skimmed the paper, and it looks like they are looking for swearing _anywhere_ in the repos' code, not just comments. I would be curious to see the ratio of swearing in comments vs code identifiers. I'd also be curious to see if the repos with swearing in their comments just have more comments in total. Perhaps the correlation is, "code with more comments is more likely to be higher quality".

DonHopkins 3y ago
Swearing in the comments is for goodie goodies. Bad assed programmers swear in public apis like class names, functions, variables, and documentation!
- blarghyblarg 3y ago
  The best programmers I've worked with swore at their coworkers regularly, but never in their code. They were not great people, and I'd happily kick them in the face if I would encounter no legal or professional repercussions, but, there definitely does seem to be some correlation (in my experience) between being abrasive and being a skilled programmer.
  - ftxbro 3y ago
    apotheosis in terry davis
    - blarghyblarg 3y ago
      RIP. Likely the Platonic Ideal of an abrasive programmer. I'd put mid 00s Linus Torvalds as the apotheosis. Despite being an incredibly abrasive person, he has left a mark on history.
  - paxys 3y ago
    Coworkers who swear are just more memorable. Plenty of great ones quietly get the job done without a fuss and without seeking to always cause a scene.

bjornsing 3y ago

Sure, that means someone cares.

z3t4 3y ago

Or that those that need to adhere to strict linters, formatting, etc are less happy with their life and thus use more profanity. eg. "code quality" tools that does not have any benefits besides finding potential bugs that does not effect the state of the program, like lines that are 71 characters long instead of 70 characters.

whoopdedo 3y ago

From the research paper: > we calculate the swear factor as the number of swearwords divided by the lines of code That's what I suspected. Assuming that most swear words will be contained in comments, what this is actually measuring is the ratio of comments to code. In other words, code that is more heavily commented is better. I think we already knew this. That said I would like to see a more critical analysis. First control for comment density. Then compare code quality to swearing in comments and also variable names.

mr_00ff00 3y ago
Isn’t commented code no longer considered a good idea in most companies? I used to work for a bank and the policy is no comments unless absolutely necessary, because comments become out of date. Doxygen is the only real comments allowed.
- almet 3y ago
  I'm not sure the ratio of comments to LoC is a sign of good quality code. Too many comments might actually be a bad thing. It's more lines to maintain, and sometimes the comments just tell what the code is doing where there is no need to.
  - brazzledazzle 3y ago
    I find that comments are most valuable when onboarding/understanding an unfamiliar code base. Comments composed of a little bit of “what” some “where” and a lot of “why” seems best for this scenario.
- makeworld 3y ago
  Wow, that seems strange to me. Seems like the policy should be to make comments when needed, and keep them up to date.
- paxys 3y ago
  That's an idiotic policy and definitely not something that is industry standard. Code gets out of date as well, so let's just stop writing it altogether..

skrebbel 3y ago

My pet theory is that this is because honest, emotional comments are much more useful than the usual “professional” style that try to hide it when you have no clue what you’re doing. When it’s clear someone was stuck, frustrated, banging their head against the wall etc while writing a particular bit of code, you can refactor a lot less defensively because you know the crappy parts weren’t secretly there for a reason. I love real, honest, emotional comments. Pour all the frustration in there. Future you and your colleagues will thank you.

jamesgreenleaf 3y ago
I think so too. Profanity, in small amounts, is an indicator of honesty. Everyone swears sometimes. If you never do it in front of others, it signals that you're always filtering yourself.

sircastor 3y ago

Anecdotally, it seems to me that I work with a lot of folks that swear frequently but not in their code comments.

yk 3y ago

> Next, Strehmel and his team quantified the compliance of these two different sets of open source code with coding standards. The results were presented as an indicator of the quality of the source code through the SoftWipe tool. I would read that study as coding standards lead to profanity. (Not sure wether or not coding standards should be correlated with code quality, I just think it is obvious that the measure is correlated with the conclusion in an obvious way.) [Post posting:] Also looking at the plots, it seems that the two distributions are different, first the swear word distribution seems to be wider and second it has a clear outlier at "software quality" 8, so if anything it is an indication that something much more complex is going on.

ydnaclementine 3y ago

One rule I live by is I never ever swear in comments or commits, just not worth it. Even in personal projects. But one of my favorite projects to ctrl-f for "fuck" is in the jedi outcast source code. Since it is proprietary and was a good game: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agrayj%2FJedi-Outcast+fuck&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Agrayj%2FJedi-Outcast+fuck...

arp242 3y ago
> But one of my favorite projects to ctrl-f for "fuck" is in the jedi outcast source code. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_b2B5tKBUM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_b2B5tKBUM
evilotto 3y ago
I'm guessing the multiple instances of i = 0x5f3759df - ( i >> 1 ); in the results are one of those inverse-square floating point bit tricks.
mike_hock 3y ago
> Sign in to search code on GitHub lolwat

alpaca128 3y ago

> Much of the community considers profanity as a vulgar display of lack of intelligence and education, because why use profanity when you have a rich vocabulary? Why not use the full range of one's vocabulary?

bregma 3y ago
Ten thousand bilious blue blistering barnacles that's a tremendous idea! Or by "full range" did you mean "limit it to a few well-worn cliches"?

coding123 3y ago

in other words, it increases the chance that the programmer is in a specific locale (like the US?) such that the location has less bad programmers than other locations. And probably, increases the chance that the person is fed up with fixing someone else's code - hence the anger

twodave 3y ago

The best CS professor I ever had always said that the #1 language among programmers is profanity.

saintradon 3y ago

Isn't there a study that shows that people can tolerate pain better when they swear? This doesn't really surprise me. I'll swear in my code if I really feel like it but commits and everything else I keep more presentable.

pyeri 3y ago
It's just that you've evolved biological filters that "block" the swearing from getting voiced out as being presentable takes the priority? The way our society is progressing right now, such evolution seems to be the direction that we all will take eventually.

pyeri 3y ago

Probably same goes about the people? The emotionally charged person that swears and gives a mouthful usually ACTS better than the cold calculated one that speaks the right words but full of cunning inside?

ftxbro 3y ago

now we let goodhart's take its course

pak9rabid 3y ago

// fuckin eh

BizarreByte 3y ago

I find it a bit suspect swearing would ever even get though a proper code review. It’s extremely unprofessional, I would tell someone to remove it.

MacsHeadroom 3y ago
And this is precisely how language policing slows down technical progress.
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  No, this is why you should be a professional. Swearing doesn’t belong in your employers codebase, it’s tasteless, looks bad, and may age very, very poorly.
KerrAvon 3y ago
you're from the east coast, aren't you?
- klysm 3y ago
  At least in New England we swear quite a bit I’m not sure on what basis you are making that accusation
- BizarreByte 3y ago
  I’m not from America at all.
klysm 3y ago
What harm does it cause?

scns 3y ago

Reminds me of a study. It showed, that swearing enables you to tolerate pain better. It was simple. Two groups, both had to put their hands into ice water. The group that was allowed to swear could do it longer. I'd hypothesize, that programmers, who actually care about quality, swear more. Individuals with AD(H)D might have a have a lower tolerance to pain. This, coupled with wide open sensual channels and decreased impulse control, might be a contributing factor. [Edit] added parenthesis and link Not correlated to swearing, but AD(H)D: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdT4DIiX7Nk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdT4DIiX7Nk

mpweiher 3y ago
> I'd hypothesize, that programmers, who actually care about quality, swear more. Ding ding ding, I think we have a winner! If you're not moved to profanity by most code-bases, you're either not paying attention or don't understand.

yodsanklai 3y ago

I'm surprised this is still a thing. I suppose this is associated with "toxic masculinity" which is frowned upon nowadays. I'm always a bit worried that I forget to edit my swearing and that it goes to code review.

yongjik 3y ago

Sorry for being off topic, but let me introduce you to the only true metric of code quality: WTF/minute. https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/ https://www.osnews.com/story/19266/wtfsm/ One wonders if profanity in the source code interferes with reviewers and skews this important metric ...

charonn0 3y ago

I only swear in commit messages. Am I doing it wrong?

OnlyMortal 3y ago

Fuck that code!

fnordpiglet 3y ago

When we open sourced the Netscape Navigator a major undertaking was code sanitation. This including excising licensed libraries etc (resulting in an initial release that wasn’t able to compile), but also removing enormous amounts of profanity and references to how evil Microsoft was.

DonHopkins 3y ago
JWZ sure could flame in the comments, especially about Motif. http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif.html http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/unix-haters/x-windows/motif....

aosmith 3y ago

This is a normal part of software... You find something really bad, git blame says it's your own, you leave a vulgar comment about how bad it is for the next guy.

helmsb 3y ago

Correlation ≠ Causation

DonHopkins 3y ago

The original terminal emulator terminal.el in gnu emacs, written by mly (Richard Mlynarik), was particularly salty. I finally tracked down a copy, but it looks like somebody complained and in 1990 it was begrudgingly cleaned up a bit, so some of the worst stuff was moved out into a separate file called term-nasty.el for posterity (you, here, now), so as not to give "in to the pressure to censor obscenity that currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US" (oh, Richard <3 ): https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emacs/lisp/ChangeLog.3 https://opensource.apple.com/source/emacs/emacs-59.0.80/emac... 1990-08-26 Richard Stallman (rms@mole.ai.mit.edu) * terminal.el: Move possibly offensive comments to term-nasty.el. https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/terminal.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... [...] ;; disgusting unix-required shit ;; Are we living twenty years in the past yet? (defun te-losing-unix () nil) [...] ;; (A version of the following comment which might be distractingly offensive ;; to some readers has been moved to term-nasty.el.) ;; unix lacks ITS-style tty control... (defun te-process-output (preemptable) ;;>> There seems no good reason to ever disallow preemption (setq preemptable t) [...] ;; I suppose if I split the guts of this out into a separate ;; function we could trivially emulate different terminals ;; Who cares in any case? (Apart from stupid losers using rlogin) [...] (?\C-b . te-backward-char) ;; should be C-d, but un*x ;; pty's won't send \004 through! ;; Can you believe this? [...] ;; Did I ask to be sent these characters? ;; I don't remember doing so, either. ;; (Perhaps some operating system or ;; other is completely incompetent...) [...] ;;-- Not-widely-known (ie nonstandard) flags, which mean ;; o writing in the last column of the last line ;; doesn't cause idiotic scrolling, and ;; o don't use idiotische c-s/c-q sogenannte ;; ``flow control'' auf keinen Fall. "LP:NF:" ;;-- For stupid or obsolete programs "ic=^p_!:dc=^pd!:al=^p^o!:dl=^p^k!:ho=^p= :" ;;-- For disgusting programs. ;; (VI? What losers need these, I wonder?) "im=:ei=:dm=:ed=:mi:do=^p^j:nl=^p^j:bs:"))) [...] (setq te-process (start-process "terminal-emulator" (current-buffer) "/bin/sh" "-c" ;; Yuck!!! Start a shell to set some terminal ;; control characteristics. Then start the ;; "env" program to setup the terminal type ;; Then finally start the program we wanted. (format "%s; exec %s" te-stty-string (mapconcat 'te-quote-arg-for-sh (cons program args) " "))))) [...] ;;;; what a complete loss [...] https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/lisp/term-nasty.el https://www.digiater.nl/openvms/freeware/v10/emacs/common/li... ;;; term-nasty.el --- Damned Things from terminfo.el ;;; This file is in the public domain, and was written by Stallman and Mlynarik ;;; Commentary: ;; Some people used to be bothered by the following comments that were ;; found in terminal.el. We decided they were distracting, and that it ;; was better not to have them there. On the other hand, we didn't want ;; to appear to be giving in to the pressure to censor obscenity that ;; currently threatens freedom of speech and of the press in the US. ;; So we decided to put the comments here. ;;; Code: These comments were removed from te-losing-unix. ;(what lossage) ;(message "fucking-unix: %d" char) This was before te-process-output. ;; fucking unix has -such- braindamaged lack of tty control... And about the need to handle output characters such as C-m, C-g, C-h and C-i even though the termcap doesn't say they may be used: ;fuck me harder ;again and again! ;wa12id!! ;(spiked) ;;; term-nasty.el ends here Note to the gentle readers: "wa12id" stands for "with a 12 inch dildo". Jamie Zawinski kept Lucid Emacs nasty: https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m/xek-XhmQ9eoJ https://groups.google.com/g/gnu.misc.discuss/c/U5oXKOfWinQ/m... Noah Friedman, Aug 3, 1992, 4:54:20 AM In article <15i2n9...@hal.com> wood...@hal.com (Nathan Hess) writes: >In article <FRIEDMAN.9...@nutrimat.gnu.ai.mit.edu>, friedman@gnu (Noah Friedman) writes: >>It's by no means necessary, but it's funny. >Along the same lines, look at lisp/terminal.el Of course, terminal.el is actually useful, albeit not terribly powerful. (and terminal.el is pretty mild compared to some of the other things I've seen written by mly. :-)) Incidentally, a lot of terminal.el has been rewritten in version 19. Too bad... I liked all the variable names and comments in the original. Jamie Zawinski, Aug 5, 1992, 12:40:38 AM In the FSF-distributed Emacs 19, the obscenities (will) have been stripped from terminal.el, though they are preserved in a file called term-nasty.el, to avoid appearing to bow to the censors. In Lucid GNU Emacs, terminal.el will remain as nasty as it ever was. -- Jamie "Truth, Justice, and the Fucking First Amendment" Zawinski

gweinberg 3y ago

I've noticed the same effect in HNN posts. The more profanity there is the comments, the better the original post! Unfortunately there's no good way to take advantage of this; optimizing to the metric destroys the value of the metric.

cjsplat 3y ago

While at Sun in the early 2000's, I was part of the due diligence team for an acquisition and had two days to review the entire code base of a 3 year old, 50 person software team. This was standard practice, and the M&A policies knew that there was no way to actually understand all the code so there was a policy document to describe what to look for. Of course the red flag things were unexpected 3rd party copyrights and/or license terms in case the code was encumbered. But "swear words" were on the yellow flag list, in addition to "ToDo", "XXXX", and "Fix Me" types of things. I remember thinking about places I have been in the past and that the people used those style comments tended to be the better programmers. I mentioned this to the person leading the evaluation, and was told that point of noticing these kinds of comments was to look a more closely at the nearby code and try to decide if major functionality was missing or being faked. It all worked out for that acquisition, but I remember being curious about whatever deal had gone bad in the distant past that made them codify this specific practice.

tsukikage 3y ago

"In 2018, Adam Farley, a contributor to the OpenJDK project, the presence of profanity in the source code." Someone accidentally a verb.

koromak 3y ago
"As part of your study, reviewed and analyzed over 3800 open source code containing profanity in English and over 7600 profanity-free open source code on GitHub." Wow, over 3800 code? Thats so many code! And its my study? Even better!
jraph 3y ago
They didn't their sentence. It makes it quite.

stainablesteel 3y ago

someone hired a team to review 10k repos just for this?

happytiger 3y ago

Fuck yea it is.

gridspy 3y ago

My Hypothesis 1. Passionate developers often swear more often when they feel safe to do so 2. Developers work better in a "safe environment" where they are not judged / forced to follow other guidelines by social or employment pressure. And another point : those places where it's unsafe (often due to managerial micromanagement) are miserable places to work. That can drive away skilled developers or suppress them if they remain. All this is assuming the research metric is real, though I'm not sure it is. If the metric for "code quality" is actually "precision following a coding standard" you'd have though that rigid adherence to procedure would lead to a higher score?

l0b0 3y ago
Absolutely. Passion and trust → swearing and quality.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Fuckin'-A

danans 3y ago

I bet there are a lot of less visible but stronger correlations to code quality, including incentive structures, programmer time spent to code ratio, quality of tools, quality of documentation, etc. Swearing in code, however, is much easier to quantify, and of course chosen to chuff up those who think swearing itself is a virtue. It would be a mistake to draw the conclusion that allowing swearing in code will improve code quality.

pickingdinner 3y ago

Not to get too philosophical, but does profanity measure the children in the room, or does it measure the adults in the room? Schrodinger's chat (room).

ratel 3y ago

My favorite (almost) obscene quote I found reviewing code, although I never could find the back story to it: "Which idiot wrote this crap? You did! Which idiot hired me?" I think this also points to the statistical significance. Code that has been worked over a couple of times and/or has been worked on by different people for all those hard and fringe problems will be better, but also accumulate more comments venting the trouble people had fixing them. It does not seem very interesting.

makeitdouble 3y ago

An alternative take: Swearing was more abundant in the earlier days and the code that survived until today is probably better that what got lost along the way. In general the coding population has grown, we're more used to coding in corporate settings with code reviews, commit message processing etc. and the bulk of devs aren't just as emotional in writing their comments (some will still swear like sailors, but it's not the norm) > The study relied solely on the source code written in C. This in particular, probably reduced the number of hobby and beginner's project in the study.

briantakita 3y ago

Until every fucking wanker who reads this article adds profanity to their shitty code expecting their bullshit to be better.

cozzyd 3y ago

Improve your C code with this one neat trick! #define fuck if #define shit else #define ass return

wjholden 3y ago

This story and the resulting discussion here on HN are such a great example of data mining with statistical methods. The researchers found a non-obvious result using statistics. Now we're all speculating about the underlying cause, trying to apply our domain knowledge to explain the result.

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