[bawolff]

I'd bet a lot of the non-profanity code is people open sourcing code just to be impressive on resumes or for school, where the profanity code is probably real code.

Sounds likely to be a classic case of correlation != causation

[bitofhope]

Rorschach test for programmers: give your confident gut feeling explanation for this phenomenon.

I'll do mine: there's likely a correlation between needing to maintain a professional conduct which includes forgoing foul language (you're programming at work) and writing code under time pressure where getting a product ready for release is more important than strict adherence to clean programming practice (you're programming at work).

Everyone post your favourite conjecture!

[jerf]

Everything is correlated: https://gwern.net/everything

Take almost any two things like this and you're actually virtually guaranteed to draw out some weak, but quite likely statistically significant, correlation.

What lies behind that correlation is probably a entropic mishmash of so many factors that it defies human explanation, and also, defies any attempt to try to "harness" the forces that seem to appear. It could be that all the siblings to the comment are right all at once.

I'll cop to just glancing at the graphs, but they don't look out of line for this effect to me intuitively.

Also backing this is that more-or-less the same article/thesis could easily have been written for the opposite correlation.

[dogleash]

> Everyone post your favourite conjecture!

Places uptight enough that developers never swear in comments are uptight in other ways that lead to poor team dynamics which hinders quality.

[hinkley]

Making people jump through hoops because reasons leads to various forms of quiet quitting.

[painted-now]

My gut feeling: when you start to submit swear words in your code, it indicates that you "breathe" the code and know it in and out.

The other extreme: if you have no idea what you are doing, you might try to mimic "corp speak" in your code to hide the fact that you actually have no clue.

In other words: it needs some confidence in your ability to assess some aspect of the code in order to use swear words.

[bawolff]

This seems unlikely to be true in this case because the study was looking at github projects, and it seems unlikely the sample had enough code from "uptight" work places, to have an affect one way or another

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

The developer who knows what they're doing is also more likely to be 1) overworked because they do much of the useful stuff and 2) cognizant of bureaucracy which gets in the way of them doing useful stuff.

[jghn]

I remember there being a startup in the Dotcom era, I forget the name but for people familiar with Cambridge, MA it was where the IDEO is now. They were notorious for a few things, but one of them was writing open source software with a lot of profanity.

I thought this was cool, and was talking excitedly about it to my boss and some of the senior devs. They were less amused. Cut 20 years later and I too am less impressed by this.

Not that I think it's *bad* per se, I'm not clutching pearls or anything. But I never find myself thinking what the code really needs are profanities in the comments. Whereas back then I thought it'd be funny/cool and went out of my way to do so when I could. Which wasn't often.

[didntcheck]

Swearing for the sake of it does look childish, yes. I've noticed that in a few streaming TV shows, where they've gotten too excited over a lack of censorship that they just end up looking like teenagers who still think saying "fuck" is an act of rebellion

On the other hand, I'd like to write something like "this is a bit shit but will be replaced later" because that's how I naturally speak. Sanitising it to "crap" or "poor" just makes me feel like I'm teaching a youth club or something, and it is a minor pipeline stall in my train of thought while I do a mental synonym search

[nomel]

I wonder if swearing can help "free the mind" in some way, with the "rebellion" opening up more, perhaps non-standard/out of the box, "fucking good" ideas?

[eastbound]

or express a wide range of subtlety.

[didntcheck]

Yeah. Speaking without profanity always makes me feel a little irritated and constrained. Not because I only know how to speak with profanity and use it as a crutch, but because I use both profane and non-profane words as tools to convey a wider gamut of nuance. So shrinking my lexicon is shrinking my dynamic range

[seadan83]

I hear this, comments generally should not draw attention to themselves. For this, short & terse win. I routinely look to cut any unnecessary words from comments.

It was the most painful code review where I asked someone to remove a joke they wrote in the comments. It was a good joke, funny, short, in good taste, I loved it, but.. distracting and unnecessary.

[rfw300]

I don’t think anyone is saying it’s causation, the correlation is in and of itself interesting!

[bawolff]

I mean i think the article is implying that. However i think the bigger thing is the correlation is misleading due to the sample being the long tail of github projects, which i dont think is representitive of "production" open source projects and certainly not software in general.

[MoSattler]

So, you're saying that my code won't improve simply by sprinkling F-Bombs everywhere?

[mikrl]

The C code so impressive they had to remove it from K&R:

if (*some_bullshit >= shit_tolerance){

fucks_given = 0;

exit(IM_DONE);

}

[HeyLaughingBoy]

Why bother setting fucks_given if you're exiting?

mmm

/embeddedme says it could be a memory-mapped peripheral that needs to be reset on exit. But that's a stretch.

Why am I even thinking about this?

[bawolff]

Correct: fork bombs rarely help

[passwordoops]

There's only one way to find out!

[gweinberg]

Nobody suggested causation. The idea that you can improve code quality by adding profane comments is so self-evidently absurd that nobody would even suggest such a thing. Except you kind of just did.

[zitterbewegung]

I would bet the opposite because I can make a blind assertion.

[bawolff]

You're beting that people swear in code in order to impress future employers?

[gtirloni]

No, they are saying your argument is baseless and they can do the same.

[bawolff]

Can they though? Like sure its pretty easy to idly speculate, but instead of doing that they decided to claim the opposite. My claim, well i wouldn't call it baseless since its based on the study protocol in TFA, certainly might be wrong. But the opposite claim is almost surely wrong, to the point of being absurd. Which is the claim they made.