I'd bet a lot of the non-profanity code is people open sourcing code just to be impressive on resumes or for school, where the profanity code is probably real code.
Sounds likely to be a classic case of correlation != causation
Sounds likely to be a classic case of correlation != causation
I'll do mine: there's likely a correlation between needing to maintain a professional conduct which includes forgoing foul language (you're programming at work) and writing code under time pressure where getting a product ready for release is more important than strict adherence to clean programming practice (you're programming at work).
Everyone post your favourite conjecture!
The other extreme: if you have no idea what you are doing, you might try to mimic "corp speak" in your code to hide the fact that you actually have no clue.
In other words: it needs some confidence in your ability to assess some aspect of the code in order to use swear words.
Places uptight enough that developers never swear in comments are uptight in other ways that lead to poor team dynamics which hinders quality.
Take almost any two things like this and you're actually virtually guaranteed to draw out some weak, but quite likely statistically significant, correlation.
What lies behind that correlation is probably a entropic mishmash of so many factors that it defies human explanation, and also, defies any attempt to try to "harness" the forces that seem to appear. It could be that all the siblings to the comment are right all at once.
I'll cop to just glancing at the graphs, but they don't look out of line for this effect to me intuitively.
Also backing this is that more-or-less the same article/thesis could easily have been written for the opposite correlation.
I thought this was cool, and was talking excitedly about it to my boss and some of the senior devs. They were less amused. Cut 20 years later and I too am less impressed by this.
Not that I think it's *bad* per se, I'm not clutching pearls or anything. But I never find myself thinking what the code really needs are profanities in the comments. Whereas back then I thought it'd be funny/cool and went out of my way to do so when I could. Which wasn't often.
It was the most painful code review where I asked someone to remove a joke they wrote in the comments. It was a good joke, funny, short, in good taste, I loved it, but.. distracting and unnecessary.
On the other hand, I'd like to write something like "this is a bit shit but will be replaced later" because that's how I naturally speak. Sanitising it to "crap" or "poor" just makes me feel like I'm teaching a youth club or something, and it is a minor pipeline stall in my train of thought while I do a mental synonym search
if (*some_bullshit >= shit_tolerance){
fucks_given = 0;
exit(IM_DONE);
}
mmm
/embeddedme says it could be a memory-mapped peripheral that needs to be reset on exit. But that's a stretch.
Why am I even thinking about this?