[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.