11 ms·
Theory: the shift towards lesser swearwords is a sign of corporatization, making the linux source a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.
by holowoodman 1y ago
Theory: 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.