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OpenJDK Bug Report Complains Source Code 'Has Too Many Swear Words' (java.net)
Thursday a bug report complained that the source code for OpenJDK, the free and open-source implementation of Java, "has too many swear words." An anonymous reader writes:
"There are many instances of swear words inside OpenJDK jdk/jdk source, scattered all over the place," reads the bug report. "As OpenJDK is used in a professional context, it seems inappropriate to leave these 12 instances in there, so here's a changeset to remove them."
IBM software developer (and OpenJDK team member and contributor) Adam Farley responded that "after discussion with the community, three determinations were reached":
IBM software developer (and OpenJDK team member and contributor) Adam Farley responded that "after discussion with the community, three determinations were reached":
- "Damn" and "Crap" are not swear words.
- Three of the four f-bombs are located in jszip.js, which should be corrected upstream (will follow up).
- The f-bomb in BitArray.java, as well as the rude typo in SoftChannel.java, *are* swear words and should be removed to resolve this work item.
He promised a new webrev would be uploaded to reflect these determinations, and the bug has been marked as "resolved."
That's a pretty wide definition of "bug".
I'd think that maybe they could devote their debugging efforts to more annoying bugs...
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Fuck this shit ...
let the programmers & community decide by up-voting this if they care.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Obviously, we are moving more towards NewSpeak. It seems nobody reads the classics anymore and the same evil mistakes are getting prevalent again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
I can see the one for this ticket now:
"Updated comments to remove 'fuck' 'shit' and 'bollocks' as some millenial wanker decided to complain. Pussy."
One of my favourite code comments came from a French Canadian coder in a shutdown routine for a Unix daemon process that spawned a lot of child processes where he wrote: "And now we kill all the children...".
Mental note: Next utility I don't want to make will be entirely constructed using profanity.
Just need to work out the style guide for it now, high level is open to discussion.
I've seen very select cases where swearing in comments can be useful.
There was a piece of code I saw that people thought was a bug, but was actually purposefully written a particular way to get around a bug in the compiler. Even after comments like // SERIOUSLY do not touch this it's a workaround for CVXXXXXX
People kept messing with it. Finally the dev checked in // DO NOT F****ING TOUCH THIS
and the regressions went away. Again, niche applications, but still valid.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
As if removing the words will make that monstrous ball of crap better.
Perhaps it might be a good idea to figure out (and fix) the underlying reasons prompting developers to swear in comments.
As an aside, One late evening, I once constructed an sql query to look for a variety of swear words in the bug database used at Alias (before Autodesk bought us) -- Amon several, one stood out. It was originally opened by a customer (working in New Zealand on some small films made there -- something about a ring or whatever). It was epic in its use of invective. It tore a strip off of the software and the cretins who had written it (myself included, but not specifically named). The author had been hired and was working at Alias at the time of my query (this was a few years later) (Hi Dave :-) ). We had some fun passing the link to the bug report around.
Ian Ameline
Jesus!
is someone now going to waste their time checking for variable names, words in comments, ... that just happen to be a swear word in French, German, ... and by transliteration Hindi, Chinese, ... ?
To some life forms with a certain point of view, civil society is developing a preference for the non-threading, emotional positive form of communication that some but not all refer to as NewSpeak. Due to misogynist, patriarchal, and racial bias of European based civilization, no correct thinking person would read the heteronormative propaganda that some maladjusted life forms would self-proclaim as classics, wrongly implying they had more, not equal value, to the works of other races, cultures, or pronouncement by any person. In doing so, these misogynist, patriarchal, racist individuals hatefully believe that ev***, I mean non-normative points of view, may become prevalent.
"Liberalism is a very noble idea, currently controlled by some very bad people. Be sure you do not get the two confused.
It was an old open source project in the late 90's. I could probably dig it up, if it's still around and the repo goes back that far..
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
When you self proclaim to be virtuous (ie open source is more cirtuous than proprietary) you will eventually attract people who consider themselves to be virtuous. This is a consequence of that.
People kept messing with it. Finally the dev checked in // DO NOT F****ING TOUCH THIS - and the regressions went away.
This is exactly why you should really try not to swear, in writing or in speech...
It's because it cheapens the words, and they loose effect.
These days if someone called you a motherfucker, it's kind of like calling you annoying. It has no power.
The reason that comment kept people away is because swearing in code is still relatively uncommon, so it has power. So keep the F-bombs out of code, so when the time comes where it is needed, it still works.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think they should be evaluated on a case by case basis. If for some reason the devs on a project keep messing with the magic number assigned to a file type, a well placed comment cussing them out to prevent that behavior is probably called for. Cussing someone out for a dumb mistake in the code is probably not warranted and should be reverted.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Does this reporter have any evidence of people using the source of OpenJDK and being somehow unable to cope with the comments or otherwise having problems because of the language?
It sounds to me like he's making shit up.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
What is the sufficient amount?
Here's a tip: do something about something that matters and stick your moronic childish worries about some words up your ass.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Another developer left in ShowError("Fuck! Got null again!",true/*=fatal*/) in shipping code.
Another one had a long rant denouncing Osama Bin Laden as a static string, unused but visible in strings.
It happens a lot.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Vandals were abusing Unicode bidirectionality control characters to break the layout and spoof moderation scores, which I've called the erocS problem. A secondary problem is many other Unicode code points are more suited for making lewd "ASCII art" (in the broad sense) than for polite discussion using English language prose. How did SoylentNews, which runs a fork of Slashdot's software, solve these two issues?
In my opinion, there aren't enough.
Have gnu, will travel.
religion doesn't prohibit others from swearing. It only prohibits the religious person themselves from swearing.
Until the religious people set up organizations like Parents Television Council that lobby governments to prohibit swearing.
If someone went on a tirade cussing out the developers for the occasional profanity, and demanding everyone else change their behavior, I would tell them to fuck off. From what I can tell, they do didn't have a freak out, they just did a pull request to clean things up.
> I'd think that maybe they could devote their debugging efforts to more annoying bugs...
While I don't disagree, I also note that their work is slightly more useful than what you and I contributed to OpenJDK.
If this person wants to remove the F bombs to make it more "professional", okay - doesn't hurt me. Go ahead and clean it up if you want to.
..or code submitted, feel free to provide "better" submissions with cleaner code or cleaner comments and if people like your version better, it gets in. This is Open Source, no one should be allowed to push out content (incl comments) the project agrees is good without providing a superior submission. Besides this criticism totally ignores the possibility that the thing being described was not so bad that profanity was the most accurate description.
If these snow flakes are that sensitive for perceived insults, I demand all references to "problem" to be removed from OpenJDK. See "problem" translates to my native language as "sknt", which is written as "sikinti" when ASCII used. "Sikinti" in turn can be used in several different contexts those are related to "dick", "fuck" and "fucking". OTOH I am afraid we can actually find some morons who would take my complaint above seriously and try to "correct" this issue. My apologies in advance for any inconvenience that might cause.
Mark Twain had to trash the first print run of Huckleberry Finn because an engraver made a subtle pornographic change in an illustration. I doubt he cared whether this off-color joke was ever meant to become public --- as an editor and publisher he had to answer for it. Think about who will be reading your comments and whether they are actually useful.
For religious reasons I insist source code contains a significant amount of blasphemy. Time to open a bug.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Mankind: zombie process
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It doesn't meet the original design criteria, it's unclear it meets the current one either, it's abysmally slow, it encourages bad programming and it causes profuse profanities.
So it's still better than C#, but really isn't fit for any kind of professional setting.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
In my experience, swears in comments are like swears in real life - usually 90% of the f-bombs in a given group are one or two people. It's not that the other people are so prim and proper that they won't swear, it's that they only swear when it's called for. But there'll be that one person who has to whip out fuck for as an adjective for every minor ailment in their life.
[Of course, it's different in groups where 90% of the sentences spoken contain a swear word. I haven't often been in such groups since I left the farm.]
Adam Farley is a fucking snowflake and has no sense of humor :]
This is such a non-news. There wasn't even any controversy inside the project. Just a patch, short discussion, resolution, like many others that happen in many different projects each day. How is this newsworthy in any way?
..NOT XKCD.
WTF/m
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
I've written tens a couple hundred thousand lines of code in my life.
Sometimes, "fuck" is the exact word that expresses things correctly, precisely and honestly. Didn't they teach you in CS class to write good documentation? There's stuff out there that cannot be captured any more perfect than writing "fuck".
I'm all for maturity and professionalism. And when I get a piece of code from someone else and I need to fix it or maintain it or extend it, I don't want it white-washed to conform to someones idea of political correctness. If dealing with this particular piece is a case of fuck, then it is a piece of fuck and I want to know that so I can approach it properly, not thinking "ah, there's a small bit of complication here, no biggie".
So fuck them and their attitude. Comments are there to transport important information about the code. They aren't campaign speeches or scientific articles. They aren't job descriptions or diplomatic messages to foreign countries. If the author of the code put "fuck" in the comments, that transports important information to me about the code.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
JRR Tolkien was a Nazi? You seem to be confused...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Even if "crap" and "damn" are not swear words, I fail to imagine a situation where they are appropriate in a comment or a variable name (unless you are building a bad language filter, of course).
What prevents us opening now a bug it has too little swear words? Several people can play that game.
Comments in code are there for a specific purpose. They exist to explain to you, the reader of the code, the intention, functionality and side-effects of the code. Since code cannot fuck, there is no need for the word "fuck" to be found, spread liberally or otherwise, in source code comments.
Grow up, learn to use the English language properly, and learn to express yourself concisely and clearly in the comments in your code. At best, a "fuck" in the comments is a waste of space. The comments aren't there to get something of your chest, they're there to explain.
At some point in the future, some of us might be writing firmware for sex robots. At that point, we can have this conversation again.
A: Profanity.
I'm less concerned with swearing in the code than I am with code that makes the users swear.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.