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

Abbreviation:

[Stanistani]

Would 'BS' count as a reference to Ms. Spears? Just asking.

Re:*snicker*

[njfuzzy]

What did they expect to accomplish by calling to scold a former employee?

Hillary Clinton? Duh.

[AKAImBatman]

The fact that Hillary Clinton outstrips McCain and Obama should come as no surprise. She spent 8 years in the public eye, back when no one had even heard of the other two candidates. Expressing surprise that she is 'in the lead' as it were, is just silly.

Re:Am I missing something here?

[vertinox]

Why on earth would I want to have to reference the ParisHilton class? and how would that be helpful to other developers? This is silliness.

I think the reason why so many open source projects have odd comments or funny comments is that its being made by people who aren't being paid and don't have a manager breathing down their necks so they'll use whatever they'd like at the time. Personally I think comments are the best part of open source code.

My fav so far:

/* DRUNK. FIX LATER */

Source and some more amusing comments.

What, no examples?

[Frosty Piss]

The "article" (if you can call it that) shows neither neither charts of actual numbers, nore places the uses in context (with or without examples). Good grief.

Re:Am I missing something here?

[Cornflake917]

Is there really a difference?

Re:Am I missing something here?

[metlin]

At my previous company, we were part of an R&D lab, so most folks had PhDs or graduate degrees in one form or another.

Anyway, every once in a while people would leave physics equations in the comments section of checked in code or documents. Once late at night, I was working on an architecture document that needed some major changes. So, I left a comment along the lines of, "Architecture changes complete. $change 1. $change 2. $change 3 etc. Also did $foobar, $foobar, $foobar. Also discovered warp drive. Space too little."

Anyway, the VP was a theoretical physicist who basically updated the document just to have a funny quip on Minkowski space in there etc. The whole thread continued between folks forever.

I mean, work was good but these comments made the work interesting, and adds character to the folks working on stuff.

Intuitive connections

[StreetStealth]

Your Paris Hilton example is funny, but it is why I actually do sometimes use amusing function names -- I can more easily remember what they do if their silly names actually reference their behavior.