Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

vidarholen.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 278 posts

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#161

Post by ano-ther »

holowoodman wrote: post #2

Theory: the shift towards lesser swearwords is a sign of corporatization, making the linux source a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.

> bland hellscape of conformity

I see three reasons to use swearwords sparingly, even though they don’t particularly offend me.

1 Managing my own emotions. Most swearing is negative and that drags you down which is not very productive or fun.

2 Managing others‘ emotions as they burst out, which stresses the people around the swearer.

3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which makes them sound fucking stupid.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#162

Post by thfuran »

dp-hackernews wrote: post #134
thfuran wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd. No more absurd than the notion that a mere sequence of sounds could convey any other meaning or elicit any other response.

If a comedian elicits a laugh from a person - who is at fault if the person laughs, the comedian or the person? I would argue that the person is at fault. Unless you are suggesting one does not have a choice whether to laugh or not. If that were true, then all comedians would either be funny, or not funny, for all people. That is simply not the case.

Fault doesn't really have anything to do with the original assertion. In any case, that's a pretty weird take on comedy. When you hear a joke, do you ponder it, decide to interpret it as funny, and then deliberately choose to laugh?

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#163

Post by BeetleB »

ctde wrote: post #157
alistairSH wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but that time was nearly 30 years ago. Linux has been "mainstream" since at least August 1999.

people like me contributed their freetime afterwards still

People still do. I think the point he's making is that the bulk of the kernel's source coming from people paid to do it has been a thing for probably over 20 years.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#164

Post by thfuran »

gspencley wrote: post #147
thfuran wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are people out there who believe in crazy things. We agree on that. How we should treat those people, or react to their existence, is entirely outside of the scope of conversation. It is perfectly acceptable to call an irrational belief irrational. But in this context, the purportedly irrational belief is that some phrases are offensive. If you accept that there are people who would, rationally or not, be offe…

> But in this context, the purportedly irrational belief is that some phrases are offensive. If you accept that there are people who would, rationally or not, be offended by some phrases, then I don't understand why you would even make the claim that it's absurd to believe that some people would be offended by some phrases. Now I understand why we are talking passed each other. Thank you for the clarification. You ar…

I have made no claim of any kind about the inherent badness of words. I'm just saying that your claim that

>The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd

is completely ridiculous. There plainly do exist words that offend people. Maybe you meant 'everyone' rather than 'anyone'? But that's pretty much a straw man anyways.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#165

Post by BeetleB »

javcasas wrote: post #42
holowoodman wrote: post #2

Theory: the shift towards lesser swearwords is a sign of corporatization, making the linux source a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.

I have never worked on a big corporation. But I find interesting about corporations forbidding swearwords in code. I mean, the people responsible for forbidding swearwords rarely read code. And if they read code with any frequency and are somewhat proficient at it, most likely they have their own list of swearwords. Also we should look to add more keywords to programming languages that trigger naïve filters. I'm all…

> But I find interesting about corporations forbidding swearwords in code.

How common is this? I work in a big corporation and we have no such policy.

When we contribute to open source, there's a good chance they'll make us remove any. Internal code, though? Up to each team to decide.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#166

Post by dp-hackernews »

thfuran wrote: post #162
dp-hackernews wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a comedian elicits a laugh from a person - who is at fault if the person laughs, the comedian or the person? I would argue that the person is at fault. Unless you are suggesting one does not have a choice whether to laugh or not. If that were true, then all comedians would either be funny, or not funny, for all people. That is simply not the case.

Fault doesn't really have anything to do with the original assertion. In any case, that's a pretty weird take on comedy. When you hear a joke, do you ponder it, decide to interpret it as funny, and then deliberately choose to laugh?

People take offense, whether the other person intentionally gave it or not.

I choose not to be offended by anything what soever. Humor on the other hand is a lot harder to deal with.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#167

Post by westmeal »

ano-ther wrote: post #161
holowoodman wrote: post #2

Theory: the shift towards lesser swearwords is a sign of corporatization, making the linux source a soulless bland hellscape of confirmity.

> bland hellscape of conformity I see three reasons to use swearwords sparingly, even though they don’t particularly offend me. 1 Managing my own emotions. Most swearing is negative and that drags you down which is not very productive or fun. 2 Managing others‘ emotions as they burst out, which stresses the people around the swearer. 3 Some people just can’t say a fucking sentence without gratuitous swearing which ma…

Hey I use fucking in every fucking possible way but I'm only slightly fucking stupid ok? Fuck man.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#168

Post by gspencley »

thfuran wrote: post #164
gspencley wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in this context, the purportedly irrational belief is that some phrases are offensive. If you accept that there are people who would, rationally or not, be offended by some phrases, then I don't understand why you would even make the claim that it's absurd to believe that some people would be offended by some phrases. Now I understand why we are talking passed each other. Thank you for the clarification. You ar…

I have made no claim of any kind about the inherent badness of words. I'm just saying that your claim that >The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd is completely ridiculous. There plainly do exist words that offend people. Maybe you meant 'everyone' rather than 'anyone'? But that's pretty much a straw man anyways.

> Maybe you meant 'everyone' rather than 'anyone'?

Maybe. IMO the sentence works to convey the meaning I had intended either way.

It is not a strawman to suggest that there are people, a lot of them, who believe that certain words are bad by nature. That any given person (the fully qualified way of expressing "that anyone") who hears them will be offended, or have their soul diminished, or other bad things will happen as a result of hearing them. It's not a strawman, because I grew up around such people. They exist. And that's what I was talking about.

And while I was not talking prescription - what we should do as a result of such people existing - I would ask a rhetorical question. WHY do people get offended by certain words? Is their offence rational? And how should rational people regard such offence?

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#169

Post by mrguyorama »

wat10000 wrote: post #112
javcasas wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great that you can do/lead and write professionally. But, in any case, writing professionally shouldn't take priority over doing/leading. Otherwise we wouldn't have the Linux kernel; and I bet the swearing guy behind it got more stuff done and made a bigger difference than the combination of the most effective programmers you have ever met.

False dichotomy. "Writing professionally" is also known as "communicating effectively" and it is part of doing/leading. Linus made an enormous impact, certainly. He'd have had an even bigger impact if he was less of a caustic dick. And before you say that there's a tradeoff involved and that genius technical people are just that way, look up Berkson's paradox.

Linus is a great example actually, because people pointed out he was being too much of an asshole, and he eventually agreed, and he reduced the toxicity of his rhetoric, but you can bet if the situation called for it, he would still use vulgarity to get his point across.

If you totally ban profanity or vulgarity, all you do is force other words to take up the slack of what people use those words for, and therefore increase ambiguity.

Don't lazily add profanity to the code base because you are a child (ie no, don't use "fuck1" as a variable name FFS) but if there is something truly insane going on, I'm going to write "This is fucking magic" in the code, and my coworkers will know to give that code the respect it deserves.

Consider the fast inverse square root code. Most people only know it because "what the fuck" in a comment. Intensifiers are useful in communication.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PrecisionFStrike

Your code SHOULD have few swears because few situations deserve an intensifier like that, but some situations absolutely call for it.

Re: Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

#170

Post by gwbas1c »

In one of my internships we once started searching the source code tree for swear words. It ultimately demonstrated who was professional, and who wasn't.

One thing that was funny was when we searched for moron. There was a file that basically said "[this workaround exists] because [name of someone] is a make-moron."

Post reply on HN