Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

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Occurences of swearing in the Linux kernel source code over time

https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/

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Most uses of 'retard' are in variable names like B43legacy_OFDMTAB_ADVRETARD but we also have

The switch is so retarded that it makes our command/entry abstraction crumble apart.

and

we shouldn't need asm for this, but gcc is being retarded

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Most uses of 'retard' are in variable names like B43legacy_OFDMTAB_ADVRETARD but we also have

That explains the sudden drop, with legacy code being removed

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If I am reading this correctly the Linux kernel needs to give more fucks…

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I added banana (for scale) and it's on the up and up: https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/#fuck*,shit*,crap*,bastard,penguin,banana

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Either they have paragraphs of oddly specific insults or banana pi is becoming popular.

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yep, it's almost all banana pi, and at least 4 different 'models' of it it seems. But the word is also used in some string processing tests and as an example comment of how suffix arrays work..

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Never understood why 'damn' is a swear word. Is it a religious thing?

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it relates to damnation and is basically short for 'i sentence you to eternal damnation/hell'

It lost all of its flare when being condemned to hell became a casual thing (eg. 'go to hell')

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It'll never stop being funny to me how in the US it'a apparently considered pretty bad and even gets censored while here in germany it's one of those child friendly swears that you expect kindergarten kids to say.

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In Norway "shit" is considered the child friendly way of swearing since it's not religious. I still have no idea why it's considered swearing in English/USA

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Interesting, here in germany I'd say that's like a medium level swear (the sexual ones are what I'd consider high level, the religious ones usually no one cares about, at least in the north).

I wonder if the 3 usual categories - religious, sexual, fecal - can be approximately ranked (at least with one being the clear "worst" or "least bad") in every culture or if sometimes it's all over the place.

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For comparison, "amazing" occurs six times.

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edited

And most of those cases are of course using the word sarcastically

collapsed list of them

The next function to implement is called, amazingly, next(); its job is to
move the iterator forward to the next position in the sequence.

if (lc->sync == NOSYNC)
    for (i = lc->header.nr_regions; i < lc->region_count; i++)
        /* FIXME: amazingly inefficient */
        log_set_bit(lc, lc->clean_bits, i);
else
    for (i = lc->header.nr_regions; i < lc->region_count; i++)
        /* FIXME: amazingly inefficient */
        log_clear_bit(lc, lc->clean_bits, i);

/*
 * Amazingly, if ehv_bc_tty_open() returns an error code, the tty layer will
 * still call this function to close the tty device.  So we can't assume that
 * the tty port has been initialized.
 */

 *   this header was blatantly ripped from netfilter_ipv4.h
 *   it's amazing what adding a bunch of 6s can do =8^)

/*
 * I studied different documents and many live PROMs both from 2.30
 * family and 3.xx versions. I came to the amazing conclusion: there is
 * absolutely no way to route interrupts in IIep systems relying on
 * information which PROM presents. We must hardcode interrupt routing
 * schematics. And this actually sucks.   -- zaitcev 1999/05/12

 * corresponding ABS_X and ABS_Y events. This turns the Twiddler into a game
 * controller with amazing 18 buttons :-)

 * In an amazing feat of design, the Enhanced Features Register (EFR)
 * shares the address of the Interrupt Identification Register (IIR).
 * Access to EFR is switched on by writing a magic value (0xbf) to the
 * Line Control Register (LCR). Any interrupt firing during this time will
 * see the EFR where it expects the IIR to be, leading to
 * "Unexpected interrupt" messages.

 * Thanks BUGabundo and Malmostoso for your amazing help!

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I didn't add a star at the end for the word search, so at least for that example, the sarcastic ones were all 'amazingly' and consequently not counted, and the 'amazing' at the end seems literal. I haven't looked at any other cases, though.

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TIL “damn” is an insult.

I thought it was just an intensifier.

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Now do in GTA V source code

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Would that be more or less, do you think?

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When there's an organic-looking decline that seems like a good sign, but the sudden sharp drops seem likely a sign of "corporate oversight" and not an actual improvement.

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I don't see a sharp drop as a sign of corporate oversight at all.

Stuff may be tackled en-batch. Or individuals can care. Or it can be an organic team decision or effort.

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Coding is a very... emotional activity. We get a bit salty sometimes.

I remember commenting a particularly bad routine with "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate".

There are also phrases such as "by the process of offending god, this somehow outputs..." and "This block was written by someone whose sanity was not so much questionable as it was entirely reprehensible - but it works".

I also remember doing a search and replace of every instance of the word "fuck" with "[fornicate]" when bringing someone new onto a project.

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Only one of them barely reaching 200. For the size of the Linux kernel I find these numbers surprisingly low.

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I would have expected the comments to be pretty dry and to the point. Thos eare some interesting stats. 🤣

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Comments in Linux@lemmy.ml

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How does that compare to the growth in size of the overall code base?

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The sharp uptick of crap flown around 2.6 piques my interest. As does someone's introduction of 'retard' into the vocabulary shortly prior. Must have been popcorn times.

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I don't think this uptick of 2.6 sounds fair to be interpreted as a timeline because it stuck around for five years. Also around that time embedded devices boomed, and LTS kept it alive well into 2010s. I bet there have to be a large amount of swears from the later developers tried hard to fix bugs.

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I quite liked how the original Linux fix for the Spectre-style speculative execution bug on Intel processors was called "Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines", but alas, in the interest of diplomacy it was renamed to "Kernel Page Table Isolation" (KPTI) rather than "FUCKWIT".

Doesn't feel like it was that long ago, but of course, all search results are dogshit in this new age: https://wccftech.com/intel-kernel-memory-leak-bug-speculative-execution-performance-hit/

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I never really looked into what they were doing with KPTI.

Assuming it's accurate, that first one is a much better technical description, even if it was intended to spell FUCKWIT

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Meh, crap is barely a swear word is it?

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Moreso than idiot though. It's almost always been considered a swear-word, but if you're looking for a stricter, smaller set, those go by "cuss-words".

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I've never considered it a swear word. It's more of a euphomism for "shit". My criteria for "swear" word is whether it is something a kid can say in school with getting yelled at. I realize this may have changed since I was a kid.

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Fuck and shit are the only classic swear words on there and shit really isn’t these days.

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now … how many of those were by Linus?

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Swearing in source code points to a healthy and organic development.

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OK make a graph of swear words used by Linus and all others against Linus's age. I've a theory.

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Comments in Linux@sopuli.xyz

Incidences of curse words in my electronic medical record:

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Comments in Linux@lemmy.world

What's with the defuckening?

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Looks to me around the time that Torvalds shaped up

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I don't know. I kinda liked angry T-Dawg flipping off Bill Gates. It adds some friction sometimes, but sometimes it's nice to have a psycho on your team... Just not Stallman. He's too much.

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He also used to flip off contributors, which people eventually convinced him was scaring off good developers.

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I'll take code with swear words over closed code with corporate babble anytime.

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Fuck will always be there at least a few times as long as my favorite software package exists.

https://github.com/nvbn/thefuck

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I don't think that's part of the kernel.

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That's true. I misread.

Still, it's a really useful tool.

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I wanna see the mailing list

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I'd like to see this in a stacked graph.

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Comments in Linux@sh.itjust.works

So it's still crap, but it has progressively fucked less over time

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"Crap" is a swear word? Even my fundamentalist Christian, church 3x a week and weekly bible study groups father says "crap."

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It is. If you say it as a teacher, youre going to hear complaints about it from the parents just as fast as if you had used the f-word.

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What about "bastard" and "penguin"?

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when has idiot been a swear word?

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Comments in 196@lemmy.blahaj.zone

Some of these have to be comments. Even then, I don't know if that's appropriate to use the term "retard".

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most of them are in comments, around 4.18 they went through and got rid of a lot of "fucks"

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Crap is by far the most dynamic word here. Interesting.

Edit: why is it so far past 'shit' in both scale and dynamism?

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Ignoring the initial growth, I wonder what got implemented during the big upticks in 'crap' and the one for 'fuck'.

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What about the word "cancer"?

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