Correlation between swearwords and code quality in open-source code? (2023) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

Correlation between swearwords and code quality in open-source code? (2023) [pdf]

cme.h-its.org

45 pointsharporoeder20 comments

I believe pretty strongly that swearwords are a negative indicator in the long run. It is one thing to voice your frustration internally or when debugging and another to ship them out into posterity, which is unprofessional. I was pretty turned off when I discovered that an OSS tool that I was using in an enterprise environment had a feature name that was also a dick joke. I was forced to use this tool by my employer without proper vetting and it ended up being a disaster. It was widely used in the field but fell on its face on some mission critical basics. I found and fixed a heinous bug due to their incorrectly using the openssl library. Ultimately, this tool ended up being a significant factor in the product I was leading failing.

Now, I will admit that the dick joke was not the cause of my problems but it was the first thing that put my antennae up and ultimately did lead me to uncovering a lot of problems with the project. That experience will forever make me wary of projects that expose such nonsense either in their public interface or in their code. Save that stuff for your private projects and friends.

The parts of code that always interests me, even above what the code does, is the human part of it - the comments, the names, the asides. Some are very funny. Crassness remains crass; but at some level the exhibitions of frustration, or joy, or disgust still amuse me immensely. It's the honest humanity of it that's intriguing. It says "this was written by a person".

We still need to be reminded that computers are made by and for humans.

I think there might be a difference between FOSS and closed source software. I tend to agree with the interpretation that swear words are signalling emotional investment.

In my experience in closed source software swear words tend to point to deadline-driven dread of not getting it right while in FOSS it tends to describe disbelief about third-party APIs and platform bugs that have to be accomodated for.

From my perspective comments (and error messages) in closed source software tend to form a narrative structure than their Open counterpoints can't really get away with. We aren't going to erase comments like ###EVERYTHING BELOW THIS LINE IS BULLSHIT because the guy who wrote it really knew what he was talking about and nobody has the time to look into it.

Dick jokes etc. in Open software just make it a school project... unless it's something like printing a giant dick once a millennium, or a dick acrostic only visible in some ancient terminal default.

It's the old bimodal distribution effect and trying to draw a linear correlation between them, or that meme with the two sides of the bell curve.

At some level, swearing is an indicator of emotional immaturity and a preponderance of subjectivity.

At another level, not swearing is repression, oppresion and a denial of reality and any investment in the project.

So what we want to see in the best projects are the programmers who are emotionally invested yet also objective enough to swear at the real situations around themselves and not repress themselves, but who aren't so emotionally immature as to swear because it's cool/edgy :)

Honestly if I build something that is OSS, I don't care if company A is using it or not. If I did, I'd make it closed source with a paid license.

you assume professionalism and technical ability are positively correlated. my anecdotal observations would lean the other way but i have no data to substantiate this on

i do disagree with the methodology of the paper though - adherence to standards is a metric of conformance to a status quo, which as someone else’s comment points out feels like the midwit meme

The analysis doesn't seem to have controlled for the number of comments in code. Maybe commented code is higher quality, and comments have some chance of swearing.

I was also thinking the same thing. It should have been easy to parse for it because they were only checking articles in C anyways. Some frustrated coders could vent some rage against the machine in comments.

In the D programming language forums, we don't allow swear words. It's just unprofessional.

I guess D prefers constant dick jokes and innuendos instead? They're kind of asking for it with their choice of name for their language.

We require professional demeanor in the D forums at all times.

Discussed at the time:

Open source code with profanity in comments is statistically better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464 - July 2023 (214 comments)

Correlation between the use of swearwords and code quality in open source code? [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34761052 - Feb 2023 (59 comments)

Do better coders swear more, or does C just do that to good programmers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157212 - March 2023 (2 comments)

Higher quality code contains swear words - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34757419 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)

Brilliant abstract.

I'm too fucking lazy to Google the paper about a more general relationship between swear words and intelligence

The ranty thread about posix and locales remains one of my favourites

Somewhat related

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711977

Given that fuckit.[py,js] is one of the most well engineered libraries...

If you're studying a junkyard, the few pieces of junk their owners swear by are probably better than the other junk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com