alex chiang: web 6.0

I just read the most pointless article from Ziff-Davis in my entire life, about how Open Solaris code doesn’t have swear words in it. This is worthy of a news article!?!?

A cursory search through the code revealed almost a complete lack of commonly-used profanity. This is in contrast with other examples such as the leaked Windows 2000 code and the Linux kernel project — which are famous in coding circles for the number of rude words programmers have included in an adult-rated effort to describe how a particular portion of the code works.

I don’t know much about the programming practices over at Microsoft, and I’ve never looked at the Win2k source code, but I’m somewhat surprised to hear that there is a lot of profanity in it. Maybe the culture there is different, but I have a hard time understanding why you would feel the urge to type “fuck” or “shit” into code that you are checking in, and how other people reviewing your code don’t seem to care.

Linux, on the other hand, I can understand the need for the hackers to feel cool and awesome that they’re not working for the Man and get to do sweet things like say “fuck this piece of hardware” in a comment or something. Man, I bet they get all the chicks… or something.

Just for fun:

Wow, look at those Linux guys. Aren’t they cooooool? Man, they’re cool!

fuck! shit! fuck! fuck! fuck! shit! I want to program Linux! fuck! shit!

Oh wait, my ratio of fucks to shit is wrong.

shit! shit! s… err, fuck! shit! shit! s… fuck! Yeah…. I’m coo, I’m coo.