from Hacker News

Correlation between swearwords and code quality in open-source code? (2023) [pdf]

by harporoeder on 10/1/24, 6:50 PM with 20 comments

  • by thefaux on 10/1/24, 9:44 PM

    I believe pretty strongly that swearwords are a negative indicator in the long run. It is one thing to voice your frustration internally or when debugging and another to ship them out into posterity, which is unprofessional. I was pretty turned off when I discovered that an OSS tool that I was using in an enterprise environment had a feature name that was also a dick joke. I was forced to use this tool by my employer without proper vetting and it ended up being a disaster. It was widely used in the field but fell on its face on some mission critical basics. I found and fixed a heinous bug due to their incorrectly using the openssl library. Ultimately, this tool ended up being a significant factor in the product I was leading failing.

    Now, I will admit that the dick joke was not the cause of my problems but it was the first thing that put my antennae up and ultimately did lead me to uncovering a lot of problems with the project. That experience will forever make me wary of projects that expose such nonsense either in their public interface or in their code. Save that stuff for your private projects and friends.

  • by mkj on 10/1/24, 10:54 PM

    The analysis doesn't seem to have controlled for the number of comments in code. Maybe commented code is higher quality, and comments have some chance of swearing.

  • by WalterBright on 10/1/24, 11:40 PM

    In the D programming language forums, we don't allow swear words. It's just unprofessional.

  • by dang on 10/1/24, 11:07 PM

    Discussed at the time:

    Open source code with profanity in comments is statistically better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464 - July 2023 (214 comments)

    Correlation between the use of swearwords and code quality in open source code? [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34761052 - Feb 2023 (59 comments)

    Do better coders swear more, or does C just do that to good programmers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157212 - March 2023 (2 comments)

    Higher quality code contains swear words - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34757419 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)

  • by anonymousDan on 10/1/24, 9:34 PM

    Brilliant abstract.

  • by singularity2001 on 10/2/24, 11:40 AM

    I'm too fucking lazy to Google the paper about a more general relationship between swear words and intelligence

  • by secondcoming on 10/1/24, 11:44 PM

    The ranty thread about posix and locales remains one of my favourites

  • by croes on 10/1/24, 10:15 PM

  • by cozzyd on 10/3/24, 3:01 AM

    Given that fuckit.[py,js] is one of the most well engineered libraries...

  • by jart on 10/2/24, 1:41 AM

    If you're studying a junkyard, the few pieces of junk their owners swear by are probably better than the other junk.