https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf
"One of the most fundamental unanswered questions that has been bothering
mankind during the Anthropocene is whether the use of swearwords in open source
code is positively or negatively correlated with source code quality. To
investigate this profound matter we crawled and analysed over 3800 C open
source code containing English swearwords and over 7600 C open source code not
containing swearwords from GitHub. Subsequently, we quantified the adherence of
these two distinct sets of source code to coding standards, which we deploy as
a proxy for source code quality via the SoftWipe tool developed in our group.
We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly
better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several
statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an
indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code
and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough,
critical, and dialectic code analysis process."
Via Linux Weekly News:
https://lwn.net/Articles/923164/
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*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
