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Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time
- holowoodman 1y agoTheory: the shift towards lesser swearwords is a sign of corporatization, making the linux source a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.
- endmin 1y ago[flagged]
- dmos62 1y agoAre you implying that the ban has something to do with blandness and conformity?
- mschuster91 1y agoLet's set Linus' personal opinion aside [1] - the fact is, the Linux kernel team hasn't had much of a say in that matter. Both the European Union and the US have sanctioned a lot of things related to Russia ever since the invasion of Ukraine, and if there is one thing where "better ask for forgiveness than for approval" is a very, very bad idea it is straying too close to the edge of sanctions laws. These things don't just have teeth, they have fangs - existentially threatening fangs, to add. If you are not a nation-state entity or backed by one with a sufficiently powerful military or economy (such as India and Turkey, who openly deal in Russian oil), it is not a good idea to cross any line. [1] https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEgRMQMxZZ0z-jY4uHT+Gg@mail.gmail.com/ https://lore.kernel.org/all/CAHk-=whNGNVnYHHSXUAsWds_MoZ-iEg...
- endmin 1y agoTrue, I see your point, though it is sad.
- optimalsolver 1y agoBut also a bit more reliable.
- darkwater 1y agoThey went up, actually. "crap" skyrocketed in the last years, and the rest were more or less stable.
- bravetraveler 1y ago> They went up, actually. "crap" skyrocketed in the last years, and the rest were more or less stable. To their point, I would consider "crap" a lesser swear. More "fuck" or "shit" would counter-intuitively imply... certain qualities [by not being so conformist]
- darkwater 1y agoAnd what about damn then? Is that even a swear word?
- kps 1y agoMore crap in the tree is also a sign of corporatization.
- bowsamic 1y agoStrange 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?
- bonoboTP 1y agoIt seems like absolute count of occurrences, not normalized to codebase size. Even more informative would be to plot the occurance rate within new code.
- 0x000xca0xfe 1y agoOKR for H2: Increase edginess of Linux for a less corporate feel Key result: Boost occurrence of swearwords by 20% Key result: Create a new metric that tracks relative swearword use per line YoY Key result: Attract at least 100 comments on HN or Reddit about the new code
- rfrey 1y agoComment mastery
- Arainach 1y agoHopefully 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.
- javcasas 1y agoThere are two types of people: the ones that write the code, find the bugs (including hardware ones), find the bad design decisions (including the ones they wrote themselves)... and the ones that complain that they found a swearword in the source code they never see because compilation step. Or as they say in the army: do, lead, or get out of the way.
- Arainach 1y agoThere are far more than two types; all of the most effective programmers I've ever worked with can do everything you mentioned and write professionally. If we have to boil it down to two types, however, I'd split it as "people who think they can do everything themselves and only the code matters" and "people who build effective teams capable of far more than themselves solo", and it's the second group that does the most impressive things. Being professional and respectful is quite beneficial for that group.
- javcasas 1y agoIt's great that you can do/lead and write professionally. But, in any case, writing professionally shouldn't take priority over doing/leading. Otherwise we wouldn't have the Linux kernel; and I bet the swearing guy behind it got more stuff done and made a bigger difference than the combination of the most effective programmers you have ever met.
- dullcrisp 1y agoYeah, if only Linux could be built by one swearing guy with no external contributors like Linux instead of being a bland swear-free corporate hellscape like Linux then it could be successful like Linux.
- javcasas 1y agoI 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.
- gspencley 1y agoI don't personally care about language choices in code, but I'll play devil's advocate and speculate as to why a business might be concerned. 1. Reputational harm in the event that code needs to be shared. Say, the code gets read in court, or an outside consultant is brought in who is given access to the code. The company likely wants to maintain the same standard of professionalism that they expect when their employees write or utter spoken language in the workplace for the same reasons. 2. Similar to #1 but nuanced enough to deserve its own mention: code is a business asset. It can be sold or licensed out. The company may fear that language that it deems unprofessional could depreciate the value of that code in the context of selling or licensing it to 3rd parties. Personally I think that the fuss over "bad words" is deeply irrational to a religious degree. The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd. But you can't choose what planet you do business on and, on Earth, there are a lot of silly people.
- toast0 1y agoAlso 3, fear of reputational harm if the code leaks. Microsoft got a lot of PR for curse words in code that leaked, and then they locked it down.
- didntcheck 1y ago> the same standard of professionalism that they expect when their employees write or utter spoken language in the workplace for the same reasons. Depends a lot on the culture. In the countries I've worked in, anyone trying to forbid profanity in the workplace would be laughed out of the room. The laughter would likely turn to anger if it turned out to be Americans trying to impose puritanism on another country's project
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- eyeris 1y agoAt 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.
- mrguyorama 1y agoIn the infamous Windows source code leak, a shitload of the swears and profanity in comments are about "Those idiots in the Office team"
- perching_aix 1y ago> a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity. I'll never understand this mentality. It's code, not some """self-expressionist""" art project.
- msgodel 1y agoI think it indicates stronger internalization of the "theory" (using phrasing from "Programming as Theory Building.") There's a kind of "nesting" thing 10x/100x programmers do with code and it tends to manifest this way. The opposite extreme is the 0.1x programmer dequeing agile tickets they don't really understand and issuing broken PRs overworked senior dev "maintainers" LGTM merge. I think everyone exposed to corporate software (on both sides) is really tired of that.
- thewisenerd 1y agotheory: the amount of crap is increasing. the number of fucks given are decreasing.
- vntok 1y ago"Wtf" are increasing though, an effective indicator of code quality. https://imgur.com/only-valid-measurement-of-code-quality-J1svNp7 https://imgur.com/only-valid-measurement-of-code-quality-J1s...
- shaky-carrousel 1y agoThe crap graph is pretty similar to the garbage one.
- alistairSH 1y agoTIL: 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.
- ctde 1y agothe point being that there was a time (some greybeards might remember) where contributing to the linux kernel wasn't "work" but a fun hobby
- alistairSH 1y agoSure, but that time was nearly 30 years ago. Linux has been "mainstream" since at least August 1999.
- ano-ther 1y ago> 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.
- westmeal 1y agoHey I use fucking in every fucking possible way but I'm only slightly fucking stupid ok? Fuck man.
- pavel_lishin 1y ago> 3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which makes them sound fucking stupid. I think this is subjective.
- josephg 1y agoIt’s also incredibly cultural. Swearing in the workplace is much more normal here in Australia. In my first job at an American company, I was shocked how prissy people were about swearing. In my head I thought “these are adults, right? Why is everyone acting like a blushing teenager?”. I’m sure I sounded rough as guts to them. It took ages to learn to scale it back depending on who I was talking to. Swearing with someone about / at work is kinda an Australian way to say “I trust you and feel relaxed around you”. Forcing myself to not swear felt at first like I was pretending I didn’t like my coworkers. It was weird.
- kyleee 1y agoThis is a great real world example of why we need cultural competency training. Here it would be an HR led class where we practice swearing while talking to the new Aussie coworker(s) in order to make them feel comfortable and improve their performance and ease onboarding.
- WalterBright 1y agoThe constant use of the same two swear words shows a boring lack of imagination.
- keybored 1y agoOr 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. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291560 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44291560
- almosthere 1y agoThey just use fewer, but still write disparaging things about their peers if that's what you want.
- ImageXav 1y agoI 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). [0] https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf
- sunshowers 1y agoI show my investment in projects through means other than swearing, for example through extensive testing.
- arp242 1y agoIf 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.
- d3m0t3p 1y agoYou can check company names too ! It's interesting to see that by default, the graph shows google,apple. But adding meta, and IBM really changes the plot. Meta went from 2K to 10K+ from 2018 to 2025. While IBM seems to have stopped contributing in 2008. Since they the merging with RedHat, I would have expected to see them increase again but none of RedHat / IBM seems to have increase. https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#redhat,oracle,google,apple,microsoft,IBM,facebook,meta https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#redhat,oracle... Not sure if their name appearing means that they are contributing tho. Really cool project,
- M95D 1y agoMeta is not just a company name. Look at how it's used: https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux%20meta&type=code https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Atorvalds%2Flinux%20meta&t...
- Zobat 1y agoI wonder if there's anything not referring to IBM that matches that search. Add them and you'll see that they soar over all others.
- necovek 1y agoAll the mentions of "IBM PC"? "HP" seems to follow closely behind too (Dell is nowhere close though but comparable to "redhat"). Add "arm" in and it's a different ballgame: they are more than 2x anybody else, Meta and IBM included. Mostly goes to say that this doesn't really show much :)
- INTPenis 1y agoBut why have Apple contributions skyrocketed? I have never heard of Apple using Linux in anything.
- detaro 1y agoThis is mentions of Apple in the source code, not contributions, and non-Apple people have added lots of support for Apple hardware over the years.
- sschueller 1y agoRetard may not be in there as a swear word. It could be a comment regarding a "delay". [1] [1] :to delay or impede the development or progress of : to slow up especially by preventing or hindering advance or accomplishment
- GJim 1y agoIt's baffling anybody would think otherwise. Reddit auto-censorship (and such auto censorship elsewhere) has a lot to answer for.
- perching_aix 1y agoSee the other comment where the guy mentions it's overwhelmingly used in a non-cursing manner, then the first hit is it being used as cursing.
- lukas099 1y agoI don't think it's auto-censorship as much as language changing. For me, 'retard' is 99% associated with my friends dissing each other as kids, and 1% associated with 'delay'.
- squigz 1y agoFor me, it's mostly associated with being bullied as an autistic child, which might be the actual reason it's come to be seen as a "slur" Meh. Probably more likely is those damn automod settings on reddit (which aren't, you know, configured by moderators according to what their community wants or anything)
- jeremyjh 1y agoEvery "scientific" name for mental disability eventually becomes a slur or name. Idiot and moron were considered proper terms at one point in time. "Retard" was never proper but is easily derived from "mental retardation", which was. In the 80s/90s there was a push to use "special" as a euphemism and it was immediately picked up as a slur, I think both usages have been long-since abandoned as a result. Autistic is also being used this way but its long-term fate is not so clear to me. In general euphemisms cannot keep up with bigotry, I rather consider it a lost cause.
- cft 1y ago[flagged]
- kruxigt 1y ago[dead]
- robinhouston 1y agoWhat's the story behind the Great Unfuckening that took place between v4.18-rc8 and v5.6?
- 23434dsf 1y ago[dead]
- dijksterhuis 1y agoi like to think it’s solely down to linus. 4.18 was the second half of 2018, around the time linus took some time away and went off doing therapy to work on his “communication issues”.
- Denvercoder9 1y agoIt's not. I can't reproduce the exact datapoints from the site using `git grep`, but most of it seems to be down to a single commit that removed repeated usage of fuck from one file: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a44d924c81d43ddffc985aca14aeeaf1abd6dd22 https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a44d924c81d43ddffc9...
- Twirrim 1y agoI'm getting the feeling someone has strong feelings about IOC3. From a quick bit of googling that appears to be a Silicon Graphics ASIC
- dijksterhuis 1y agowhy did you have to ruin my hopes and dreams with facts and research? /s (that was actually interesting to scan through, dunno why but i found the `[it] is fucking fucked` -> `[it] is broken` lines hilarious)
- guax 1y agoThey stopped giving a F and started to give a S (lots of it)
- bojle 1y agoI like the fact that some words are there from the very beginning.
- b0a04gl 1y ago[dead]
- jart 1y agoAt least they left the one swear word that isn't a swear word for us.
- lloydatkinson 1y agoInteresting but I worry documenting things like this will just cause further politicisation and vitrol. See also: renaming "master" branch to "main", etc.
- amelius 1y agoReminds me of: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vbvxiv/10_years_ago_today_linus_torvalds_to_nvidia_fu_you/ https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/vbvxiv/10_years_ago_... (warning, contains footage of frustrated programmer making offensive gesture)
- tianqi 1y agoI am particularly interested in the rapid and steady growth of "garbage", among rubbish, trash and junk. What does this indicate? An evolution of English?
- inopinatus 1y agoThe GPU access ring buffer aka GARB is expired after a set duration i.e. when garb_age exceeds the garb_age_dump value.
- mlok 1y agoThe band Garbage became popular around 1995. Would be interesting to look for any correlation.
- TheSilva 1y agoGiven that it started appearing in 1995, I will assume it is because of the influence of the movie Hackers in the developers of the kernel source.
- mcosta 1y agoSome kind Garbage Collection inside the kernel?
- plq 1y agoAFAICT the consensus is to say that an uninitialized variable (eg. int i;) has "garbage value". I'd say it's rather a technical term than profanity.
- shakna 1y agoA mindless grep. It's probably picking up the massive amount of effort that has gone into link-time garbage collection, and socket inflight garbage, and so many, many others.
- peterlada 1y agoThe first derivative would have been a better plot. Perhaps overlaid with dates of cultural shifts.
- akie 1y agoMissed the opportunity to include "garbage" in the list of default words for that graph... 5 times as frequent as the next runner up, "crap".
- VMG 1y agoBut what if somebody implemented garbage collection?
- neuroelectron 1y agoWhat garbage?
- RedShift1 1y agoPretty sure 99% of these are gonna be in the drivers and direct hardware interaction bits.
- inopinatus 1y agoThe decline in serious profanity is especially disappointing given that Linus is a Finn. I have Finnish friends and they have explained to me that at least half the core vocabulary is swearing.
- alanjw 1y ago[dead]
- bArray 1y agoTrying adding "ass", it explodes [1]. Not sure if that's because of keywords such as 'class' or something else? "dumb" is really on the uptake [2]. [1] https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,crap*,cunt*,shite*,ass*,arse https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...* [2] https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,crap*,cunt*,arse*,dumb*,dick https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...*
- qzw 1y agoReport: Adding ass makes stuff explode. Dumb is on the uptake. Resolution: Behaving as expected. Won't fix.
- steamrolled 1y agoAssembly, assign, assert, assume, associate... I think most of what you're picking up is not actually naughty.
- odo1242 1y agoYea, if you remove the star at the end, it goes back to normal
- BenjiWiebe 1y agoGood ol' Scunthorpe problem.
- krunck 1y agoIs this in contrast to "Jokes and Humour in the Public Android API" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44285781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44285781 ) posted 6 hours earlier?
- f4c39012 1y agoof these i'd take "idiot" as the most harmful, working against positive collaboration
- dhsysusbsjsi 1y agoAs an Australian I’m disappointed in the lack of the key word ‘cunt’ in the graph. Unless perhaps it’s zero.
- jenny91 1y agoIn the US, that is an unthinkably bad swearword for some reason.
- gsk22 1y agoThat's heavily dependent on regional/cultural factors. Among a younger and (mostly) gayer demographic, the once-feared "C-word" is very commonly used, especially in its adjective form.
- globular-toast 1y agoHow do you use it as an adjective? The bad thing was always labelling someone with the word, but there isn't really any other way to use it.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- bogantech 1y agoWe Aussies have many ways to use it as a compliment Sick cunt, Mad cunt, Good cunt Etc
- skibz 1y agoIt does feature several times.
- Green-Man 1y agoI miss year numbers on the axis, so very roughly: 1992 0.x 1994 1.x 1996 2.x 2004 2.6.x 2011 3.x 2015 4.x 2019 5.x 2023 6.x
- Centigonal 1y agoInteresting jump in "crap" right after the start of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Perhaps being cooped up inside the house hacking on the kernel is less fun when that's your only choice.
- Denvercoder9 1y agoIt's actually because someone with "crap" as a substring of their e-mail address made a bunch of contributions with their e-mail address in it (e.g. in maintainer records and copyright notices) around that time. Nothing to do with COVID-19. See the graph with the entire domain for comparison: https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#crapouillou https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#crapouillou
- Centigonal 1y agoincredible! I guess the lesson here is to never take a chart at face value. :)
- gwbas1c 1y agoIn one of my internships we once started searching the source code tree for swear words. It ultimately demonstrated who was professional, and who wasn't. One thing that was funny was when we searched for moron. There was a file that basically said "[this workaround exists] because [name of someone] is a make-moron."
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- ThinkBeat 1y agoNow can we correlate the same timeline the number LOCs Linus contributed personally?
- PaulHoule 1y agoI'd note that "retarded" can be a technical term which is not an insult or swear word which means "delayed" (e.g. "tardy") In an internal combustion engine you could have "advanced" or "retarded" spark timing for instance. It's an amusing area where denotations are the same in French and English but the denotations are different. [1] All over Quebec you see convenience stores called "Couche-Tard" (Sleep Late) which can provoke a double-take like seeing a sign for a restaurant called PFK with a picture of Colonel Sanders. [1] An ad for a breakfast sandwich, coffee and hash browns can be advertised as "L'Ensemble Quotodienne" a phrase made of everyday words in French which are $20 words in English.
- fracus 1y agoNot in source code, but the word is also officially used in aviation as an automated audio warning to the pilots to, IIRC, slow down or pull back. The system screams "Retard! Retard! Retard!". I think they often hear it during normal landing procedures. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbLHah4XUwk&t=815s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbLHah4XUwk&t=815s
- sandworm101 1y agoOnce upon a time planes dropped only gravity bombs that just fell with the forward speed of the launching aircraft. These exploded directly under the aircraft (see all ww2 footage). Then were developed "retarded-fall" or delayed bombs with fins or parachutes so that the bomb's forward movment slowed and it exploded behind the aircraft (see vietnam footage of bombs with pop-out fins). Then came laser-guided "smart" bombs. So we now have "smart" bombs which are guided, "dumb" bombs which arent, and "retarded" bombs which are dumb bombs that slow down. We have accidentally fallen into pc trap where it can be difficult to use these terms. Retarded fall "snakeye" bombs: https://youtu.be/3_RM19hOMo4 https://youtu.be/3_RM19hOMo4
- Bengalilol 1y agoMicrosoft is catching up with Linus.
- excalibur 1y agoIdk who decided what words to include by default. The graphs for "bitch" and "gay" are interesting.
- rzzzt 1y agoPeak kludge was first reached at 2002-05-18 with a total number of 118 kludges.
- Pannoniae 1y agoIt's pretty simple. More swearing implies better code because you know someone made it with passion instead of making it for resume-padding or soulless corpo stuff;) If the stupid HR doesn't like it, you are doing something right. It also conveniently filters out the permanently triggered people, doesn't matter which variety it is.
- egypturnash 1y ago<https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,damn*,idiot*,retard*,gay* https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,d...> linus says gay rights, I guess
- jiggawatts 1y agoMy take on this is diametrically opposite to the “swearing is never okay” crowd here — if you’re not swearing about your work at least occasionally under your breath, you don’t care enough for me to enjoy collaborating with you. People will immediately start arguing against this stance while simultaneously enjoying the fruits of Linus Torvalds caring enough about Linux kernel quality to use colourful language to encourage others to take critical issues as seriously as he does.
- extraduder_ire 1y agoThe "Blooeans" for misspelled true/false is pretty funny.
- DoctorOW 1y agoOP's link is the website's swearing preset added with "crap*". Clearly the website didn't consider it a swear word, nor do I. "Crap" is to "shit" as "drat" is to "fuck". I wonder why it was added?