[HN Gopher] Correlation Between the Use of Swearwords and Code Q...
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Correlation Between the Use of Swearwords and Code Quality in Open
Source Code [pdf]
Author : harporoeder
Score : 16 points
Date : 2024-10-01 18:50 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (cme.h-its.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (cme.h-its.org)
| anonymousDan wrote:
| Brilliant abstract.
| thefaux wrote:
| 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.
| kayo_20211030 wrote:
| The parts of code that always interests me, even above what the
| code does, is the human part of it - the comments, the names,
| the asides. Some are very funny. Crassness remains crass; but
| at some level the exhibitions of frustration, or joy, or
| disgust still amuse me immensely. It's the honest humanity of
| it that's intriguing. It says "this was written by a person".
| AyyEye wrote:
| We still need to be reminded that computers are made by and
| for humans.
| chromanoid wrote:
| I think there might be a difference between FOSS and closed
| source software. I tend to agree with the interpretation that
| swear words are signalling emotional investment.
|
| In my experience in closed source software swear words tend to
| point to deadline-driven dread of not getting it right while in
| FOSS it tends to describe disbelief about third-party APIs and
| platform bugs that have to be accomodated for.
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| It's the old bimodal distribution effect and trying to draw a
| linear correlation between them, or that meme with the two
| sides of the bell curve.
|
| At some level, swearing is an indicator of emotional immaturity
| and a preponderance of subjectivity.
|
| At another level, not swearing is repression, oppresion and a
| denial of reality and any investment in the project.
|
| So what we want to see in the best projects are the programmers
| who are emotionally invested yet also objective enough to swear
| at the real situations around themselves and not repress
| themselves, but who aren't so emotionally immature as to swear
| because it's cool/edgy :)
| croes wrote:
| Somewhat related
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711977
| mkj wrote:
| 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.
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