I'm curious about the motivations for coding profanity. I've occasionally included comments like "don't f* with this unless you understand x, y, and z" in an attempt to protect fragile sections of code from careless collaborators. Nearly identical comments without profanity seemed ineffective. Within common conversations I know that profanity often carries an implication of violence, usually for the purpose of intimi…
The motive seems to be to acknowledge to the reader that, yes, this code is ugly, and it's not the writer's fault; it's the product of some bugginess external to the codebase that really isn't possible to fix. Blame "fucking gcc", or Sun for having the nerve to "take such nice parts and fuck up the programming interface" (to quote two examples from the Linux code). The target of the anger is most definitely not the intended audience.