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Comment by betamike | Hacker News Reader

I skimmed the paper, and it looks like they are looking for swearing _anywhere_ in the repos' code, not just comments.

I would be curious to see the ratio of swearing in comments vs code identifiers. I'd also be curious to see if the repos with swearing in their comments just have more comments in total. Perhaps the correlation is, "code with more comments is more likely to be higher quality".

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The jury is still out if I'm a good programmer, but I did one time need to use a hashmap that had to grow to about ~100gb in size. Because of that, I ended up calling it "bigassHashTable".

It makes me happy that it remained being called that for quite awhile.

I remember a day at a previous job when our CEO came in and told us we weren't an early stage startup anymore and had to start acting like it. Remove profanity and inside jokes from the code, and no more Quake during lunch breaks. Morale took a big hit that day.

if a CEO did that to me I'd just tell him to pull the stick out of his ass. none of it has anything to do with maturity.

but I'm relatively old.

you can Quake (or Overwatch or whatever the current game is) during lunch breaks at every FAANG, for christ's sake. (it's different if you're playing it during working hours.)

Yeah. Joking around helps build camaraderie, and makes people want to stay working there. I'm not sure who or where these hypothetical pearl clutchers, who can't handle a codebase with jokes or a bit of swearing, are, or why management care so much about them hypothetically encountering the codebase and getting upset. Sanitising everything and making it family friendly just makes workplaces even more soulless, rather than letting us have a bit of character in our work. At best it makes you look humourless, and at worst it can make people feel anxious about causing offence, if it's particularly strict policing

Time to unionize over that crap

Swearing in the comments is for goodie goodies. Bad assed programmers swear in public apis like class names, functions, variables, and documentation!

The best programmers I've worked with swore at their coworkers regularly, but never in their code.

They were not great people, and I'd happily kick them in the face if I would encounter no legal or professional repercussions, but, there definitely does seem to be some correlation (in my experience) between being abrasive and being a skilled programmer.

apotheosis in terry davis

RIP. Likely the Platonic Ideal of an abrasive programmer. I'd put mid 00s Linus Torvalds as the apotheosis. Despite being an incredibly abrasive person, he has left a mark on history.

Coworkers who swear are just more memorable. Plenty of great ones quietly get the job done without a fuss and without seeking to always cause a scene.

Swore at or swore while talking to? There's quite a big difference. I don't see profanity as inherently abrasive, and some of the biggest dickheads I've met in workplaces didn't swear much at all (some were of the Professor Umbridge type, so kept up an air of perfect professionalism)

literally right there in the comment. "swore at regularly".

Anyways, I definitely agree that swearing isn't the same as abrasive, but swearing at people is definitely an abrasive trait. Also agree that some of the biggest dickheads around keep up an air of professionalism.

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