Hacker News Reader

Comment by kkoncevicius | Hacker News Reader

I remember there was a study (can't find it quickly) that said people who swear are more honest and lie less. If that is true then it's not surprising for such qualities to somehow affect other things.

From personal anecdotes I would add that swearing seems to be associated with action and getting things done. People who work with their hands and tools: plumbers, car mechanics, etc, swear a lot. But even in academia I've met quite a few very intelligent people who swear in private conversations and one common characteristic among them is they hate when things are not moving.

View on HN

I met 3 coders who swore more or less continuously while coding. But that's 3 out of probably close to 100 I have been sitting close enough during 30 years. I do it myself but probably less than at one hairy problem a week.

At least one of the 3 does not produce better code than average. One produces clearly more code than average. Not really bad code, but we are still fixing his bugs quite a while after he left the company. The 3rd one I don't remember, just shared an office, but did not work with his code.

Edit: To be clear I talked about swearing aloud. Having swear words in the code I have not seen with 30 years of experience. Except some rare examples in open source which get then a lot of publicity.

The only swear words in our code is essentially "workaround for shit we can't change/fix" or "strong warning to not change this behaviour or something will break". Like

    # as of 5.x libvirt shits on intermediate certs included in certfile and need direct path

    # once a month restart, this shit leaks

My favorite are the function documentation in some of Apple's headers.

Apple's CoreFoundation always irked me because it didn't do NULL parameter testing. Try to CFRelease(aNullObject)? You crashed, son.

I asked one the of the CF engineers about this and I was told it was a performance thing. (I can kind of see that ... caller tests that the CFCreateFoo() did not return NULL and then can make any number of subsequent calls without having to re-sanity-check that value.)

Regardless, look out for Apple headers with documentation comments similar to:

    If properties parameter is NULL returns false, does not crash like CoreFoundation.

Not cursing, but what can you do in public headers...

Swearing while coding: “Who the f#ck wrote this code, looks like cr#p, what the… oh, I wrote that five years ago… why the f #ck did I write it like that, that makes no sense, what the… oh, that’s why! …”

Reply on news.ycombinator.com