Satan, Britney Spears Top Paris Hilton In OSS References

An anonymous reader writes "Krugle, a software search company, had some time on its hands — it compared frequency of mentions in open source code of presidential candidates, Beelzebub and yes, Britney Spears." I wish they'd link to a nice long list of the other terms this revealed — there are probably a lot of subtler funny references and asides.

Comments

Re:Am I missing something here?

[AKAImBatman]

If you do a search on Krugle, you'll find that most of the references are in database files, not code. e.g. Public figures tend to show up in example data files. There were quite a few Clinton jokes back in the day, so Hillary shows up in a number of files. Paris Hilton is a common "adult" keyword, so you'll notice .htaccess files restricting it.

Here are a few examples:

http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Hillary%20Clinton
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Paris%20Hilton
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Barack%20Obama
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Tooth%20fairy

Even if you search for just code files, you sometimes find data inlined into a unit test:

http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Tooth%20fairy&lang=java
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Hillary%20Clinton&lang=java
http://www.krugle.org/kse/files?query=Paris%20Hilton&lang=java

So there you go. A whole lot of non-news. :-)

Re:Hillary Clinton? Duh.

[fprintf]

And was a POW in Vietnam for several years, refusing to come home before other prisoners. The guy was a hero, all over the newspapers way back then. Not that it means much to modern day programmers (most likely demographic for OSS contributors) who weren't around or paying attention to such news in the early 70s.

Is the summary wrong or is the article misleading?

[LighterShadeOfBlack]

The summary suggests that they measured the frequency of mentions of these terms in the source code - the article seems to suggest that they measured the terms searched for using the Krugle search engine. The former would be interesting, the latter would not.

Re:Am I missing something here?

[RiotingPacifist]

Might give that a shot, heres what had to be removed from mozilla before they opened the source
http://www.jwz.org/doc/censorzilla.html

Re:Am I missing something here?

[operagost]

The only thing that annoys me is calling Revelation "Revelations". It's one vision revealed to John the Evangelist.

Re:Am I missing something here?

[Valdrax]

Actually, "here be dragons" is an old cartographers phrase used to denote unexplored and presumably dangerous areas on maps, in the same spirit as drawing sea serpents off the coast of unexplored water.

It's kind of a running joke in computer circles.