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I am curious why "tits or gtfo" is on the list, considering that it is designed to piss off women. It's still awful and is probably one of the most vulgar things you could say to anyone... but do actual professionals say stuff _that_ offensive in software engineering settings?

I don't mean to be combative, just curious.

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Sure, it's a valid question.

This is a collection of experiences across many settings, including professional, casual and personal. I don't think anyone would ever say this seriously in a professional setting, but shit like that still happens a lot elsewhere and has a real impact.

Joining a technical IRC channel for help and being told "tits or GTFO" is pretty demoralizing. It makes you feel like you don't belong in the community, that you don't deserve to be there and that no one wants you there.

#ruby-lang irc logs: http://irclog.whitequark.org/ruby-lang/search?q=tits

It happens. I don't know how often.

How much of this happening do you think can be attributed to how young the Ruby user base tends to skew? How often does it occur on the Python or Perl IRC channels?

I don't have that data, but you could probably get it by parsing all the irc logs that are around.

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