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by edmanet 2951 days ago
Damn. The "bad" words have been sanitized. Seeing the programmers' frustrations as they appear in the comments enhances the experience when viewing old code like this.
4 comments

It's funny how in most corporate/commercial code past 2005 or 2010, you'll rarely ever see profanity in comments. I've never put profanity, or even any jokes, in comments. I really try to keep my professional code professional.

Even on my own OSS projects I tend not to do that anymore.

Unfortunate that we (as a collective --- not something I personally believe in) seem to think that that is being "professional", and that it is somehow a reason to make everything as bland and soulless as possible, and that that is somehow better? I agree that a lot of code has lost its "character", so to speak.

The Linux kernel still retains much of its fucks and shits, and apparently has gained a whole lot of crap: https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

It's an unfortunate loss for our conceptual heritage for the word 'professional' to have been mostly hijacked to mean something more like 'obedient', 'conformist', 'dull', 'bland', 'besuited' etc.

Once you don't have a word to express a concept, that concept can quite quickly fall out of circulation. Professionalism was a useful part of modern culture: it would be a shame for it to disappear from the lexicon. A horse that's bolted, I fear.

Amen!

We have ugly words for ugly feelings ideas places things. Putting them in there is no crime.

That made my day thank you :)
I don't cuss in my professional code because I work with a lot of programmers in another country, and I think it would just cause confusion. "What means 'shitpig' in the constructor?"
Really? I see it all the time in web code...

something like "// this is fucked" is pretty darn common, even in corporate code. It gets stripped by minifiers anyhow

I wonder if that's due to the trend of not writing that many comments in your code to start with? Maybe all that has migrated to the version control commit logs?
There are some choice function names in `anal.c` (Mac)

    void AnalScan( void );
It's clearly short for 'analysis', but the child in me couldn't not.
Speaking of bad words, Eudora also used to have a rating system for emails you are about to send. Too many bad words? 3 red peppers. And it would ask you "Are you sure you want to send that?"

Fun idea. We liked to try to make it look like the produce section at Fiesta.

Wow, I forgot all about that; different times!
As long as <x-eudora-setting:319=32> works…
What does it do?
Late versions of Eudora added something they called ‘mood watch’, which could highlight potentially inflammatory words or phrases (including profanity) in email and warn you before sending. The developers added a hidden setting which would, when you opened a message, speak aloud precisely those words.
And of course there is a relevant XCKD for this: https://xkcd.com/481/
In response, YouTube actually implemented this (though only as an option, and it's since been removed): https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/10/08/youtube-audio-preview/