Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

I contend that you are slipping in the words "respectful" and "professional" and assuming the benefit of their positive connotations without an argument that simply omitting the occasional well-placed curse is indeed "professional".

I think so-called "professional" speech - which I'd call bland and often ineffective speech - is professional in the same way that a suit and tie is professional. It's a uniform to ensure nobody stands out, and the corporation can absorb everybody's personality, like flour incorporated into bread dough. White bread, no seeds.

>people who think that using respectful discourse means no fun can be had will be gone

It's not absolute-zero fun, but everyone understands it's a sign the vibes will be up-right, right?

It happens to run on billions of devices, after corporations realized they can profit from "a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu)".

> and is maintained by people around the world of all types.

You seem to think that the whole world shares your definition of "polite". After living in a few quite different countries, I have to disagree. The diversity out there is huge. There's no point trying to solve this "problem", it's an impossible task.

Personally, I think the nicest thing I can do, for my users, and for the engineers who come after me, is to write code that works, and write it in such a way that other people can figure out what it does without wanting to gouge their own eyes out.

Clearly, we do not have the same goals.

There are two types of people: the ones that write the code, find the bugs (including hardware ones), find the bad design decisions (including the ones they wrote themselves)... and the ones that complain that they found a swearword in the source code they never see because compilation step.

Or as they say in the army: do, lead, or get out of the way.

> do better

I find that expression far more offensive than ‘fuck’ or ‘shit’. Similarly (and non-exhaustively): ‘bad take’; ‘not a good look’; ‘this ain't it’; ‘… not the … you think it is’; ‘…, actually’. They're all personal insults. “This code is crap” is fine; “You're crap” is not.

Yeah, you tell 'em! Anyone who doesn't conform to Corporate Culture and treat the dress code and code of conduct as their own personal Bible, upheld even on their time off, they're all terrible engineers and should go work on some script kiddie project.

I don't personally care about language choices in code, but I'll play devil's advocate and speculate as to why a business might be concerned.

1. Reputational harm in the event that code needs to be shared. Say, the code gets read in court, or an outside consultant is brought in who is given access to the code. The company likely wants to maintain the same standard of professionalism that they expect when their employees write or utter spoken language in the workplace for the same reasons.

2. Similar to #1 but nuanced enough to deserve its own mention: code is a business asset. It can be sold or licensed out. The company may fear that language that it deems unprofessional could depreciate the value of that code in the context of selling or licensing it to 3rd parties.

Personally I think that the fuss over "bad words" is deeply irrational to a religious degree. The idea that arbitrary sequences of phones or characters will cause anyone within ear or eye-shot to become offended is rather absurd. But you can't choose what planet you do business on and, on Earth, there are a lot of silly people.

> I mean, the people responsible for forbidding swearwords rarely read code.

Just plain not true.

I think it indicates stronger internalization of the "theory" (using phrasing from "Programming as Theory Building.")

There's a kind of "nesting" thing 10x/100x programmers do with code and it tends to manifest this way. The opposite extreme is the 0.1x programmer dequeing agile tickets they don't really understand and issuing broken PRs overworked senior dev "maintainers" LGTM merge. I think everyone exposed to corporate software (on both sides) is really tired of that.

> They went up, actually. "crap" skyrocketed in the last years, and the rest were more or less stable.

To their point, I would consider "crap" a lesser swear. More "fuck" or "shit" would counter-intuitively imply... certain qualities [by not being so conformist]

More crap in the tree is also a sign of corporatization.

It seems like absolute count of occurrences, not normalized to codebase size.

Even more informative would be to plot the occurance rate within new code.

See the other comment where the guy mentions it's overwhelmingly used in a non-cursing manner, then the first hit is it being used as cursing.

We have those too. I wonder how many people actually know that's what that means, cause it's not an everyday word by far here in this meaning.

I wonder if there's anything not referring to IBM that matches that search. Add them and you'll see that they soar over all others.

This is mentions of Apple in the source code, not contributions, and non-Apple people have added lots of support for Apple hardware over the years.

The recentness of this makes me wonder if this is Asahi contributions.

Apple is Berkeley Unix-based, while not actually Linux it's possible their contributions to open source have made it's way into Linux (me guessing, no real experience of either Linux or Mac).

Could also be that there's been work done to communicate with Apple specific products, again wild guesses but based on my perception of people working with Apple products is that there might be above average number of "edge cases" that needs addressing when communicating with those.

What garbage?