8 ms·
How Angry are your Developers?
- josh_fyi 14y agoSo, is angry good or is angry bad? Developers who care with a passion, or developers who can't stand what they're doing?
- jug6ernaut 14y agoTotally depends, they were just looking for key words say "shit". But that could be used as - "This shit is awesome!" or - "This shit sucks..." totally different meanings.
- edgo 14y agoThis could be improved with natural language processing but I guess it is just a quick and dirty "15 minutes" kind of solution
- pavel_lishin 14y agoMaybe, but can it detect sarcasm? d59b0a8 - Oh, this shit is case sensitive. Awesome.
- joshcrews 14y agoIn my experience with curse-worded commit messages it means the codebase is very frustrating and working on it feels like editing hack upon hack to get small changes to work. The curse words either are for "heck yeah, it finally works!" or "try again for the 12th freaking time"
- pestaa 14y agoIf your project makes me angry, that is the best sign you will ever see. If I'm angry because of duplicate code, quick hacky fixes, stupid function signatures, outdated and harmful comments and workarounds, chances are I'm going to stay awake that night to sort it out. Angry is good.
- chris_wot 14y agoContext is everything :-) how many devs do you think thought they would be exposing the commit history to the world in that company you worked at?
- 542458 14y agoReminds me of two previous HN submissions: Amount of profanity in git commit messages per programming language : http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-commit-messages-per-programming-language/ http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-c... Commit Logs From Last Night: http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com
- adrianparsons 14y agoA while back I created a project to scan a single repo for cursing and chart it by commiter. http://making.meetup.com/post/21273810443/cursemetrics http://making.meetup.com/post/21273810443/cursemetrics
- jetti 14y ago"While cursing in your git commit messages probably doesn't correlate to actual anger at your company," So first sentence goes against the title, then again, the title is more catchy and broader than "how to find swears in git commit messages". "I thought about checking on GitHub for which projects contain the "angriest" developers." I don't know if it just me, but I wouldn't say that the person with the most swears in the commit messages are the angriest, but the least professional.
- up_and_up 14y agoI would say the best way to tell how angry a developer is would be to look at the code they are writing. Is it hurried, written in poor style or maybe even sadistic :/ Sometimes the comments yield clues to that. Best one I ever saw: # !!!XXX WTF Funny example: http://stackoverflow.com/a/184673 http://stackoverflow.com/a/184673
- jetti 14y agoNo, the best way to tell how angry a developer is would be to ask them. To think that one could get any insight into emotional feelings from code is preposterous (with the exception of emotionally charged variable names or ASCII art).
- pestaa 14y agoThere is no difference at all in the style of my code whether I'm angry or not. I just happen to make more typos which makes me even more angrier. However, if poor style were the best emotional indicator, I think the angriest developers are all coming from oDesk.
- heartbreak 14y agoHey that thread is where the "There is nothing as permanent as temporary code" quote came from.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI've got some cursing in my git commits. Most of the anger typically stems now from the company, but from external sources (e.g., buggy software that we rely on, but for business reasons cannot ditch.)
- Gigablah 14y agoThis is not so much "how angry are your developers" as it is "how creative are your developers at commit messages".
- ErikAugust 14y agoWhy curse in commit msgs? I usually associate them with happy/getting things done. Comments however...
- dear 14y agoIt's not so much they were "angry" than they wanted to look "cool/extraordinary" by using those words.
- greghinch 14y agoWow I would put this down as something more like "how mature are your developers?" I would never curse in a git commit message, any more than I would curse in an email to all my colleagues. No decent programmer I've worked with would, either. Completely unprofessional.
- arethuza 14y agoWhat about one example I encounted? boolean alanIsABastard = true; I was the Alan in question - I guess I should have been pleased it was a variable! :-)
- sylvinus 14y agoat least you can submit a patch to that :)
- onemorepassword 14y agoThat's a prejudice I would be careful with. English is the working language for most developers all over the world, but not every culture is overly sensitive to swearing. Context is everything.
- paganel 14y ago> English is the working language for most developers all over the world, but not every culture is overly sensitive to swearing. I'm not an American, but it's interesting to see how strongly people from the States react to swearing. I know that for every 10 guys thinking that the usage of the word "fuck" is unprofessional there is at least one George Carlin (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsZwRirDOYQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsZwRirDOYQ), Lenny Bruce or Bill Gates (http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/ http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/), it just seems that this "puritanical" point of view has gotten stronger and stronger lately. I'd be curious about the underlying reasons.
- samspot 14y agoIn my opinion this view is getting weaker. I'm encountering more and more otherwise excellent technical posts or blogs that I'm unwilling to share with others because the author drops an f-bomb just for emphasis.
- smadam9 14y agoIs it not frustration, as opposed to anger?
- justjimmy 14y agoInteresting…so are those swear words meant to be place holders? I sometimes use images of friends/TV characters, or even lolcats for giggles. I guess some developers chose to channel creativity this way… Wonder what place holders 'angry' designers would use?
- Evernoob 14y agoHa! Have you seen the "Richard is a fucking idiot" control written by Dan McKinley? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered/184673 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-c... It's a few down from the top but there are several other "angry" developers chiming in worth chuckling at.
- Yhippa 14y agoI got a pretty good chuckle out of this. Cheekiness aside, what's a good way determine how angry your developers are?
- Tyrannosaurs 14y agoTalk to them - most developers aren't remiss in telling you what's wrong. I'd almost go further and say if you don't know without asking you've got an issue. I can tell you how happy or otherwise 75% of the people working for me are and hazard a decent guess at the other 25%.
- eps 14y agoI don't swear much, but when I do, it always ends up being in Windows parts of code. Seriously though, I've written a lot of portable code and consequently quite a few of glue layers and there is always something in the Windows API that is done ass-backwards. From something as benign as InterlockedCompareExchange taking 'exchange' first, 'comparabd' second, to mother of all clusterfucks - the IOCP networking model.
- Shivetya 14y agoOh my, and here I code song lyrics into my code. I wonder if the copyright police can get me. As to the article, I have seen some creative ways to embed messages into code, including vertical arrangements and clever use of capitalization; string the capitals together etc which combined with texting can say a bit.
- pvaldes 14y agoThis is hilarious, but a symptom that the boss is very bored and avoiding the real work. First of all, profanity is not taken so seriously in other countries, so "angry" is a relative term. Probably because to kill someone in those countries is a much more strenous physical task, so you can say "fuck you" as many times as you want to your neighbor without risking to have a bullet in your leg. Chicks impressed and nobody was killed... perfect civilised way to solve a small problem about property boundaries. f-words in those countries can express humour, angry, frustration, irony, and even a sense of victory over the evil code when you solve a bug. We try to avoid profanity in presence of childrens of course, but not a lot of childrens are expected to jump to read source code, so... adult territory, sorry boy. And finally, profanity can be very useful. If you need to put a landmark you need to find a rare word, short, not commonly used as name of a variable, nor a reserved word or one that another script will put automatically in your file. They are a relief and also an, easy to remember, way to mark a frustrating line, and these comments are easily stripped in the final version, so if you have a "shit" floating around a subroutine you know that something smells still in your code.