‘Fuck’ in Linux Kernel | Hacker News Reader

‘Fuck’ in Linux Kernel

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Why does the article title say "F*ck" instead of "Fuck"? What are we, 12-year-olds?

An article about a naughty word in Linux as almost at the top of the front page. Apparently we're 12-year-olds with or without the censoring.

No, but many of us are Americans. We have a weird sense of etiquette.

Weird indeed. American programs on TV are often so annoying when all the "F-words" are bleeped out. Whenever someone strikes his finger with a hammer or whatever you can hear a bleep from three rooms away. Yeah sure now we'll never know what he said and our poor souls are saved from this profanity. It gets even funnier when the mouth is also blurred out.

And many of us Americans say "fuck" on a daily basis. Your point?

At work to your colleagues?

If i may butt in: Yes. Many times with clients too. Just this week I was in a meeting with project managers and consultants from GE, Honeywell, Prysmian and Schneider electric and it was as if everyone was trying to one up each other on the 'fuck' count.

Exactly this. When a fucking router half-breaks at the colo and takes down our sites instead of failing over, we do use such language.

Some of us are on a SFW internet connection which filters such things. Better safe than sorry.

You need a more realistic employer.

My employer is both realistic and pretty hard nosed as it happens. It is the customers. And their parents. I'm a teacher.

A story: Try Googling "The Naked Violin" (not violinist) and you should find a page with free MP3 downloads put up by Tasmin Little, a fairly well known (and extremely respectable) soloist in the UK. She decided to do her bit for getting kids to listen to classical music. And gave it a name that guarantees every school and college firewall in the UK will block access. So I continue to point students at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum's music library (15GB of free classical mp3s).

PS: The Nouveau driver for Nvidia graphic cards under Linux is improving with each release. For almost all of my activity on my old Xeon desktop, it is fine, and the fonts look OK. I'm prepared to cut the coders a bit of slack in their comments...

I forgot your use case. I apologize for my ignorance.

I just copied the original title, which I couldn't directly link as it's [dead] on arrival: http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/13071/f-ck-in-linux-kernel

I always think of Louis CK's bit about 'The N-word'.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ

Not old enough to see naughty words.

Check out the Linux Kernel Swear Count for graphs of the prevalence of various swear words in the Linux source code over the years:

http://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

I didn't know penguin was a bad word. In what sense is it being used in the kernel?

Tux, a penguin, is the official mascot of the Linux kernel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tux.

Yes I know about that. I was asking how "penguin" could ever be considered a swearword...

I suppose it was more of a "This is interesting. While we are here..." addition to the data.

I didn't mean to insult your intelligence regarding Tux. I just know that I would rather people not assume that I know things, especially when responding on the Internet.

An old programmer joke comes to mind:

> What is the most used language in programming?

> Profanity.

LOL

Original: http://lowendtalk.com/discussion/13071/f-ck-in-linux-kernel (auto-dead url for some reason)

Raw: http://pastie.org/pastes/8285826/text

Same thing for sh!t: http://pastie.org/pastes/8285970/text

& Bloody: http://pastie.org/pastes/8285976/text

Here is the same sort of thing for the Windows source code:

We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

I never understood the obsession with swear words in source code comments or 'creative' variable naming.

It's childish, and I don't think the authors themselves found it funny anymore once they got off their caffeine high.

I never understand the condescension towards swearing.

I accept it as a thing because the States can get so puritanical, but not swearing - other than in the presence of children - strikes me as one of those self-perpetuating norms that serve no real purpose other than proving you can conform to arbitrary norms. Similar to any other way of judging you on appearance like haircut, piercings, tattoos or dress.

Sure there is value in being able to navigate those and get the advantages they confer, but why actually care about it? Or am I being obtuse and you're just playing along and perpetuating them for their own sake?

Honest question: what's wrong with swearing in the presence of children? Is it an arbitrary norm, or is there a strong rationale behind it?

For me, it's about deferring to the parent rather than having any actual objection to it. It's their job to decide how their child is introduced into the world. Including how swearing gets contextualized for them. It's a caveat to what I said only as far as its a courtesy to avoid going down the path of telling parents how to raise their kids (or putting their kids into an environment they'd object to). I'm not interested in stepping on that rat's nest, and I wouldn't be rushing to put my pre-teen in a cussy environment either. (The "for the children" censorship/restrictions is a different tangent I have things to say about too, but was trying to sidestep that because it diluted from the point in my previous post.)

I understand. Thanks. :)

Swearing works best in moderation, with good timing. Children can't usually grasp such subtlety, they dilute its effects through overuse.

Many adults do too, but that can't be helped.

I accept your premise and I can believe children can't grasp that subtlety. I don't know of many adults who obey your premise, though.

You don't swear in source code in an attempt to be funny. You do it when you're frustrated.

Always baffled me how much fucked up some chipsets implementations are.

I was expecting way more swearing throughout the Linux code :D

Agreed! I did a quick scan for sh!t: http://pastie.org/pastes/8285970/text & bloody: http://pastie.org/pastes/8285976/text

There's also LOADS of 'crap's in the code.

I once worked with a system controller that was suppose to work in both big and little endian. Too bad it just ignored the endian setup bit and would just truck along in little endian mode. These are the things I have nightmares about.

> I was expecting way more swearing throughout the Linux code

Agree! The Linux kernel is millions of lines of code, and this was all the fucks in it? :O

I remember few years ago making the same experiment while downloaded gentoo-sources and found much more at that time. :)

IIRC there were guys going around recorrecting all the profanity words just to push a commit. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLBrBBImJt4

In the ensuing hunt through the Linux sources, I discovered that there is a device called colloquially "Happy Meal Ethernet". I'm very amused to see a driver file [1] where the prefix to everything is happy_meal.

[1] drivers/net/ethernet/sun/sunhme.c

The Happy Meal is a very well known type of Sun Ethernet card found on just about every Ultra branded system with 10/100 interfaces. Under Solaris they're registered as hme devices.

Groundbreaking research. He must have used tar AND grep!!

Git grep is better!

I noticed the word "fuck" when looking at some code comments in the LibreOffice codebase, and submitted a patch to remove it. I guess I was curious to see if they would accept it. They did!

Is that all? I swear more than that at my shell some days.

I wonder the word count for perkele?

Torvalds speaks Swedish, not Finnish. What's the Swedish equivalent?

Torvalds speaks Finnish and Swedish, he is from a bilingual family. But the Swedish language has a very limited vocabulary in profanities so Linus curses in Finnish.

Fan, jävlar, satan.

But I'm pretty sure that, while Torvalds' mother tongue is Swedish, he also speaks Finnish, not having been born in a Swedish-speaking part of Finland.

Fan! (according to the hilarious and magnificent http://youtu.be/AkJf0md1kG8 )

./drivers/scsi/qlogicpti.h Am I fucking pedantic or what?

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