Amount of profanity in git commit messages per programming language
andrewvos.com
andrewvos.com
That set only includes [shit, piss, fuck, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, tits], so these are probably not meaningful results.
I have personality commented "asshole forgot to increment the counter" 527 times in 4 different languages.
[EDIT: 528 times in 5 different languages. Sorry, bitches.]
You'd want to whitelist against the Scunthorpe Problem though.
Damn is a curse, but not actually considered a swear word in most parts of the world.
Years ago at a former employer, we discovered just after shipping a large quantity of quite sensitive demo materials that an outside contractor had managed to slip a hidden profanity into it. Oh, the joy that caused....
The immediate reaction though was that a few of the less polite and proper members of the organisation were tasked with producing as close to an exhaustive profanity list as they could so we could do a relatively thorough sweep. From memory that list was pushing 40 terms - I think I might still have a copy somewhere but the last thing this discussion needs is more swearing!
Tip for anyone cacheing unsavoury words - from memory the bulk of what we ended up checking for were racial slurs, of which there's an astonishing (and unsurprisingly heavily localised) variety.
For weeks afterwards, my clients would receive profanity-laden reminders, helpfully labeled as "from Adrian".
Luckily, they had a good sense of humour about it. But since then, I've never used profanity in any kind of test data.
I cannot explain how much the injection of this in current use irks me.
Is this lack of civility, and appalling misogyny, really needed for satisfying self-expression nowadays?
People like you were complaining about the common usage of "damn" years ago too.
"damn" is no longer an issue because most people aren't terribly religious nowadays, at least not enough for people to censor themselves. That's not the case for "bitch".
You didn't answer the original question, either: would you drop the phrase "Sorry, nigger." into casual conversation? If not, why not?
You are in charge of if you get offended. It is a decision you and only you can make.
It's why the legal system has the concept of the "reasonable person", but I prefer "Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?"
"Do you talk to your mother with that mouth?"
Yes, I do. And if that bothers you, kindly fuck off. You have no place telling me what I may or may not say in the presence of my mother.
If an adult loses their temper in public, they are rightfully looked down upon. If an adult publicly becomes offended, I similarly look down upon them.
No, I'm just an adult who recognizes that words only have the power that you give them. If you wish to continue to allow your emotions to be a slave to the language of others, that is your prerogative; but don't expect others to follow you.
And yes, I addressed your question. Read the parent comment of your post again.
And that's all I'm going to say - this thread has gone on long enough.
Says a lot about you that the inclusion of minorly offensive words or implications can cloud your ability to critically interpret what others are saying. When you allow somebody else to offend you, or make you angry, you are allowing them to impair your thought processes. You are giving others the power to control you.
In order to defend yourself, you must realize that although somebody says something mean, it is up to you if you get angry, and although somebody may say something offensive, it is up to you if you become offended. In the real world, people are going to say shit you don't like. Trying to "correct" their behaviour is the wrong approach.
It's absolutely true that people are responsible for their feelings. But that doesn't mean you aren't also responsible for your choice of words. By saying that I am responsible for how I feel when I hear the word "bitches," you are trying to imply that you aren't also responsible for choosing to say it. It's perfectly valid to say that we are BOTH responsible for our choices. I should choose to ignore you, and you should choose another word. There is no need to say that one or the other but not both of us should be responsible.
I find your arguments along these lines to be passive-agressive. If you want to hurt other people with words, own up to wanting to hurt other people with words. Don't pretend that it's everyone else's fault. Because surely, if nobody took offense to these particular words, you would hunt around until you could find words that would cause offense.
You choose to use these words and phrases precisely because they have shock value. It's not like you use the word and are surprised it carries some special meaning that offends people. I see elsewhere you have told people to "fuck off." Are you seriously suggesting you weren't trying to give offense? Because if it isn't possible to give offense, why are you trying so hard to offend people??
My use of both "profane" and non-profane offensive comments in my comments is to drive home my point. It is not intended to hurt others, but merely make them think to themselves "frack it, I'm ignoring him." "What he says would normally offend me, but I'm going to have a nice evening with my wife and kids instead" ...or something along those lines.
If I get anyone to that point then maybe they'll know that in the future, if some anonymous dude dares use the dreadful word "bitch" on the internet, it's best for the sanity of everyone to let it slide.
"Because if it isn't possible to give offense, why are you trying so hard to offend people??"
-gets back in character...- Well I'd say there is a keen difference between "giving offence", which I am of course not doing, and "presenting others the opportunity to take offence". The choice is theirs.
That's the most cowardly thing I've heard all day. But it's only lunch time, so we'll see how it goes.
Whether you care is a different matter. If you don't, that makes you a rude person. Which you're free to be, if you wish.
And it has nothing to do with a segment of society. You're complaining about someone half-jokingly calling us all whiny babies.
Is it because your post is a bunch of poorly conceived bullshit? Is it because you don't really give any time to consider the intent of what's being said and the social context of the terms employed? Is it cause you're looking to be offended?
If you can't provide some analysis of the origins of thoughts and feelings which are presumably your own, maybe you should keep them to yourself till you can.
You certainly don't speak on the behalf of any women I know.
Anyways, holla out to my HN bitches.
"Blameless" bug:
Original: Now recalculates the height of the container element after repopulating
the content.
Translation: Did Bob test this fucking thing ONCE before he committed this?
Original: Tweaks the NUM_PATHS config value.
Translation: Wow, I apparently have shit-for-brains. I hope nobody ran a build in
the past 20 minutes.
Original: Updates the object creation code per Bob's feedback.
Translation: Another Goddamn FactoryFactoryBuilder?! I officially don't
understand this codebase.
Original: Style tweaks needed for GCC compilation.
Translation: OMFG. This isn't even valid C++. It doesn't even compile.
Original: Fuck IE7.
Translation: No seriously, fuck IE7.I will post up some more data if anyone is interested.
actually, maybe just a github swear browser.
(For sample data, the 100 most vulgar words on the site are in a table here: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/lists/most-vulgar-words/ )
Could develop quite a nice Programming Language Pain Index…
Sorry, Ruby!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/amit-agarwal/3196386402/sizes/l...
I like how he had to tweak the data collection process to make the visualization method fit.
This is normal and has nothing to do with how you choose to represent it.
It would have been meaningless to show any graph or table saying 'Python has the most messages with profanity" if the amount of Python projects is 80% of all the projects out there.
He should just collect as many commit messages as possible, then divide the profanity count for each language by the commit message count. Because that has lower standard error [and no more bias] than what he did.
This one in particular is very clear:
C++, Ruby and Javascript have the most profanity. They're relatively equal to each other and collectively account for more than 50% of the swearing in commit messages.
C is next, with significantly less swearing.
C# and Java are roughly tied a bit below C.
Python and PHP have, comparatively, almost no swearing.
Was that really so hard? When the data is already subjective (what is and isn't a swear word) and intended almost solely for humor, do we really need more precision than a pie chart offers?
It is at best hyperbolic and at worst dishonest to say you "have no idea" how to interpret this. You have an idea. You just don't have precision.
All the languages are equally represented by commit count.
this is the problem. In the pie chart it's almost impossible to determine which of those three has the most. In the bar chart, it's fairly obvious to my eye that C++ wins, though JS/Ruby are very close.
Of course. Python users are happy people.
I wonder what happens with PHP... ;-)
Ignorance is bliss?
> Of course. Python users are happy people.
Heh, I've been using Python lately and have felt lots of urges to swear, but I can't get myself to commit it. Shoot.
It took a half-hour to write and has consistently gotten more traffic than the rest of my blog.
Ah well, give the people what they want: http://codeulate.com/2007/12/fcking-programming/
In particular:
# no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
# no. fuck no. I am a fucking
# moron.
# This is hideous # I want to poke my eyes out with a fork!
Those working on pubic GitHub projects are probably doing so willingly. After all, if you hate PHP and are forced to use it at your day job, do you really want to go home and commit to PHP projects? Probably not.
So, what you're seeing are people not merely resigned, but who enjoy working in PHP, for all it's warts. They aren't just resigned.
And I posit that it's because PHP programmers at that level are less likely to be surprised or scandalized by the language's well-known quirks than somebody working with Ruby or C++ (i.e. they are resigned to its frustrations).
Honestly, and I don't meant to stereotype here, but I think it's because the quality of PHP developer proportionate to the number of PHP developers on github is higher than in other languages. Granted, their are fewer total. But the reason for this is pretty simple. PHP is not the popular language, so most new developers taking up programming in the past 2-3 years see a different landscape then a decade ago. Github is SourceForge and Ruby is PHP. Poor PHP developers aren't flocking to github. They are still on SourceForge (not suggesting that all SF users are bad).
Basically, the PHP developer's on github are probably the more experience developers that have been doing this for a while. On the flip side, most Ruby developer's are still comparatively new to the language.
This is a lot of assuming, and I don't mean to disparage anyone.
That all being said, while I equated the quality of the programmer with the amount of swearing being done, I fully realize it's not a fair comparison. Granted, this entire thing is based on numbers that, I feel, are fairly meaningless.
Finally, what I find more interesting is how HN's quality takes a nose dive when the population is allowed to bash a particular population: in this case, people who enjoy using PHP.
Still, good follow up. =)
Besides PHP Githubbers maybe being at a higher level on average, I think PHP's gotchas are just generally better known, so people go into it with eyes open. It doesn't take as high a level of experience to realize, say, that the standard library has wonky argument ordering as it does to find all the weird edge cases that will bite you in Ruby and horrific error messages that await in C++. Ask anyone with a decent knowledge of a few languages to criticize PHP and he'll have something memorized. Ask a Ruby programmer with five years' experience to compare and contrast "reduce(&:+)", "reduce(:+)" and "reduce('+')" and it's 50/50 whether he'll even get two right (even though the truth is that there's no difference!).
No, not you. It's why you got a reply from me that at least tried to sound intelligent. =)
But it does get tiring hearing the same useless tripe repeated, especially here on HN. PHP's worst quality is whenever it's mentioned, a bunch of know-nothing's start making what amounts to the technical equivalent of dick and fart jokes. I'll just stop there though. =)
There are a lot of people out there who think it's truly fabulous, also. Usually, PHP is their first language and they've never seriously tried anything else. They like the accomplishment of programming, and connect that with PHP.
There can also be humourous swearing, and swearing for emphasis (see DHH), neither of which convey annoyance at all.
Hypothesis A: PHP projects tend to be smaller and simpler, with fewer interactions with other code/requirements/people, and therefore fewer opportunities for annoyance.
Hypothesis B: PHP is actually a very simple and close fit to its use-case, of unambitious webapps, and so often the tool just does its job, and disappears. There's no space to swear at a tool that you don't notice.
# This new PHP library is fucking awesome!A lot of people love their tools just because they don't know better ones.
C Perl JavaScript PHP
I also occasionally code in Python and assembly for fun.
When it comes to web projects PHP is my goto language because it works in all web environments without a bunch of bullshit surrounding installation, versioning or deployment. It's 2011 people, are you telling me developers are still trying to establish some sense of shiny self importance based on language choice? Sad.
Most of the developers are bad. Assuming a normal distribution, pretty much half of them are below the average and average is not usually something to brag about.
That said, languages that stand a higher chance of generating employment should attract those that don't want to learn new programming languages (something good programmers tend to do) and want to make their bets on sure technologies. I expect programmers interested in Lisp, Haskel, Erlang, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Forth, Smalltalk to be, on average, better than those who choose Java, C#, PHP or Visual Basic. Of course, not all of those who choose these languages are bad programmers (and the opposite is also true), but I bet you will find more mediocre programmers on the second-group.
(burn, karma, burn)
"languages that stand a higher chance of generating employment should attract those that don't want to learn a new programming language" I think you're confusing PHP and Visual Basic/.NET here. Based on hit counts of job posts there are way more job opportunities for MS developers than PHP developers and based on median salary data coding .NET is worth about 20k a year more, so if they're rational actors the "just in it for a paycheck" crowd should be migrating to Windows development.
Your language salad comparisons are likewise faith-based. How about we trade anecdotes instead? I've met a total of six Ruby developers during my professional career. To a man they were immature, arrogant and totally in love with the hype surrounding their language of choice. Four of the six could be fingered for running multi-million dollar projects into the ground courtesy of a year and a half long series of hipster love-in's masquerading as a SCRUM meetings. Meanwhile during the same time period myself and one other developer launched 65 sites on four platforms with a combined total of around 1 million in annual ad revenue generated for the company. You just keep singing your song, man. I'll keep shipping shit.
Edited to add: just keep on downvoting, truth hurts.
Still, if the highly abstract programmer competency follows a normal distribution (and I admit a leap of faith there), you'll agree with me that half of the programmers out there will end up below the average. You'll also agree with me that just above the average doesn't make a good programmer, so, most of the programmers around us will be bad ones.
I don't believe you were downvoted for saying painful truths (which I don't think you did), but more on the form of your statement. I believe most downvoters didn't pass the first sentence. I believe this is a good thing - poor form is bad for discussion. We shouldn't get emotional.
It's hard to remember this is HN when walking into threads like these. As I mentioned elsewhere, if PHP is mentioned, HN maturity takes a nose dive as people make what amounts to dick and fart jokes. It's embarrassing.
> I don't believe you were downvoted for saying painful truths (which I don't think you did), but more on the form of your statement. I believe most downvoters didn't pass the first sentence. I believe this is a good thing - poor form is bad for discussion. We shouldn't get emotional.
It's not because of his tone. It's because he's defending PHP. Look at other posts in this thread. Look at the bitches thread. Littered with immaturity and a far worse tone than the parent here. Sure, the tone didn't help here, but if his tone had been the same, but defending Ruby, or Lisp, or some other fashionable language, he wouldn't have been. Even your post smells like this.
One more thing...
> I expect programmers interested in Lisp, Haskel, Erlang, Python, Ruby, Lua, Scala, Forth, Smalltalk to be, on average, better than those who choose Java, C#, PHP or Visual Basic.
Ruby is the language people go to for work now. Why? Because it's the in language, especially in the context of HN. And its' not just Ruby, but RoR specifically.
There are more jobs about Java and C# and PHP than on RoR. RoR jobs may be more frequent on sexy startups (the type that appears here).
I'm not suggesting RoR has a lot of jobs compared to the Java or C#, but rather, it's not exactly devoid of job offers either. Especially within the context of HN.
So, apologies for not being clear about the context.
Speaking of frame of reference, people belittling PHP devs are mostly showing their own ignorance.
They don't write meaningful comments at all. Including those with swears, meaning at least something.
Joke #2: What would they have to put into commit messages, if you consider so much of PHP code is not written but copypasted? What to write then - "I copypasted it from X"?
But your point being that php code doesn't get commented much is right on.
It's the same reason there is no profanity it FORTRAN or COBOL in this graph.
The author makes a terrible mistake: he does not normalize the graph relative to the total amount of code in each language.
There's a lot of Ruby on Github, which is why you can find plenty of Ruby profanity.
The graph is just about useless without this normalization.
The number of different projects ripped, on the other hand, could help skew the results of the unpopular languages.
For instance, my style of coding means I branch off, commit early and often, with flippant and meaningless messages, and then I squash and rewrite my entire change as a single, formal entity before releasing it for coworker consumption. I curse up a storm in my commit messages, but you won't see any of them unless you look inside my computer before I delete the working branch.
This is fun and funny. Nothing about it even starts approaching validity except for one statistic: "210 out of 929857", and even that gets shot down. The entire thing would have been better if he had included "hate" as a curse word.
Although I think it's fair to say the proportion of beginners and casual projects using source control and Github is probably lower for PHP than, say, Ruby.
{"JavaScript"=>48, "Ruby"=>46, "Perl"=>28}
I wonder if this has anything to do with: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2247962
I know I plan to comment my python code a little differently now! Maybe that will help balance the numbers?
I know I'd be pretty vulgar if I programmed in C++/Javascript all day!
Maybe if we looks at comments in source code we would get a better representation of the vulgarness of developers.
Would be great to see some context around where the most _profanities_ occur by language, and the kind used.
Especially the F bomb.
I've found that the only real profanity in a source code comment is "HACK".
My swear jar overflows with quarters.
- fuck it. let's release
https://gist.github.com/198320
A one-liner I wrote that uses git blame to seek out who swears the most in a given codebase. Pretty fun.
A pie chart is good for things that add to 100%. The number of swear words that occur in something is not appropriate for this type of graphic.
This is not HN worthy.
Perhaps PHP and Python has fewer occurrences because the employers of people that use Python or PHP are less likely to tolerate inappropriate language in the code.
Maybe Python programmers are just happy and well adjusted people...
Or maybe we're all just mature enough to realise swearing in comments is stupid, and trying to read anything from it is equally stupid?
There's a certain level of professionalism in PHP projects, believe it or not, that is different from what you see in Ruby, Python, C++, etc. The difference? Many PHP programmers are not really hackers, they're just trying to get something done. They're not programming for the joy of it, for the most part, they're just trying to get some plug-in done for a CMS for some client.
The code and comments often end up structured and informational, in a Java kind of way.
Good job though :-)
If you're hacking on a personal project, you might feel freer to swear in your commits. And my guess is that you're more likely to code Ruby for personal projects than C#. But I could be wrong.