
How Angry are your Developers? - jhull
http://engineerwithoutacause.com/how-angry-are-your-developers.html
======
greghinch
Wow I would put this down as something more like "how mature are your
developers?" I would never curse in a git commit message, any more than I
would curse in an email to all my colleagues. No decent programmer I've worked
with would, either. Completely unprofessional.

~~~
onemorepassword
That's a prejudice I would be careful with. English is the working language
for most developers all over the world, but not every culture is overly
sensitive to swearing. Context is everything.

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paganel
> English is the working language for most developers all over the world, but
> not every culture is overly sensitive to swearing.

I'm not an American, but it's interesting to see how strongly people from the
States react to swearing. I know that for every 10 guys thinking that the
usage of the word "fuck" is unprofessional there is at least one George Carlin
(<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsZwRirDOYQ>), Lenny Bruce or Bill Gates
(<http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/>), it just seems that this "puritanical"
point of view has gotten stronger and stronger lately. I'd be curious about
the underlying reasons.

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samspot
In my opinion this view is getting weaker. I'm encountering more and more
otherwise excellent technical posts or blogs that I'm unwilling to share with
others because the author drops an f-bomb just for emphasis.

~~~
regis
Just the fact that you used the term "f-bomb" instead of "fuck" shows that the
"puritanical point of view" alive and well.

Does it really even matter what word you use if we already know what you're
talking about?

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samspot
On the contrary, the theme of my post shows that. Can you explain why you
think the 'puritanical' attitude is a bad thing (which you are clearly
assuming). Aside from any religious points anyone would like to make, I view
this behavior as highly unprofessional.

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lotsofcows
It's humourless, homogenous, prissy, inhuman (in the sense that it removes
emotional context) and fucking boring. Correlating professionalism with the
above is very USAian. You should focus on breadth of successful interaction on
the human side and ongoing effective fulfilment of job description. Not sure
where religion comes into it outside of the Puritans who buggered off to
America.

~~~
samspot
I am quite sure that the concept of "polite conversation" is not american or
puritan-centric.

In my experience, the people using the f-word in business interactions are the
same people trying to con me. Maybe this is because several of my early
experiences correlated this behavior with people trying to get me to join
Ponzi schemes (these 'businesses' often target college-age people in the US).

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lotsofcows
The phrase "polite conversation" is meaningless in its ambiguity. I assume
from the context that for you it refers to words one may or may not use to
maintain propriety. To me it refers to the meaningless pleasantries one uses
when temporarily sharing an environment with strangers.

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jetti
"While cursing in your git commit messages probably doesn't correlate to
actual anger at your company,"

So first sentence goes against the title, then again, the title is more catchy
and broader than "how to find swears in git commit messages".

"I thought about checking on GitHub for which projects contain the "angriest"
developers."

I don't know if it just me, but I wouldn't say that the person with the most
swears in the commit messages are the angriest, but the least professional.

~~~
up_and_up
I would say the best way to tell how angry a developer is would be to look at
the code they are writing.

Is it hurried, written in poor style or maybe even sadistic :/

Sometimes the comments yield clues to that. Best one I ever saw:

# !!!XXX WTF

Funny example:

<http://stackoverflow.com/a/184673>

~~~
jetti
No, the best way to tell how angry a developer is would be to ask them. To
think that one could get any insight into emotional feelings from code is
preposterous (with the exception of emotionally charged variable names or
ASCII art).

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542458
Reminds me of two previous HN submissions:

Amount of profanity in git commit messages per programming language :
[http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-
git-c...](http://andrewvos.com/2011/02/21/amount-of-profanity-in-git-commit-
messages-per-programming-language/)

Commit Logs From Last Night: <http://www.commitlogsfromlastnight.com>

~~~
adrianparsons
A while back I created a project to scan a single repo for cursing and chart
it by commiter.

<http://making.meetup.com/post/21273810443/cursemetrics>

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chris_wot
Context is everything :-) how many devs do you think thought they would be
exposing the commit history to the world in that company you worked at?

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josh_fyi
So, is angry good or is angry bad?

Developers who care with a passion, or developers who can't stand what they're
doing?

~~~
jug6ernaut
Totally depends, they were just looking for key words say "shit". But that
could be used as

\- "This shit is awesome!"

or

\- "This shit sucks..."

totally different meanings.

~~~
edgo
This could be improved with natural language processing but I guess it is just
a quick and dirty "15 minutes" kind of solution

~~~
pavel_lishin
Maybe, but can it detect sarcasm?

    
    
        d59b0a8 - Oh, this shit is case sensitive. Awesome.

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pvaldes
This is hilarious, but a symptom that the boss is very bored and avoiding the
real work.

First of all, profanity is not taken so seriously in other countries, so
"angry" is a relative term. Probably because to kill someone in those
countries is a much more strenous physical task, so you can say "fuck you" as
many times as you want to your neighbor without risking to have a bullet in
your leg. Chicks impressed and nobody was killed... perfect civilised way to
solve a small problem about property boundaries.

f-words in those countries can express humour, angry, frustration, irony, and
even a sense of victory over the evil code when you solve a bug. We try to
avoid profanity in presence of childrens of course, but not a lot of childrens
are expected to jump to read source code, so... adult territory, sorry boy.

And finally, profanity can be very useful. If you need to put a landmark you
need to find a rare word, short, not commonly used as name of a variable, nor
a reserved word or one that another script will put automatically in your
file. They are a relief and also an, easy to remember, way to mark a
frustrating line, and these comments are easily stripped in the final version,
so if you have a "shit" floating around a subroutine you know that something
smells still in your code.

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Evernoob
Ha! Have you seen the "Richard is a fucking idiot" control written by Dan
McKinley?

[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-
best-c...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/184618/what-is-the-best-comment-
in-source-code-you-have-ever-encountered/184673)

It's a few down from the top but there are several other "angry" developers
chiming in worth chuckling at.

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Shivetya
Oh my, and here I code song lyrics into my code.

I wonder if the copyright police can get me.

As to the article, I have seen some creative ways to embed messages into code,
including vertical arrangements and clever use of capitalization; string the
capitals together etc which combined with texting can say a bit.

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eps
I don't swear much, but when I do, it always ends up being in Windows parts of
code.

Seriously though, I've written a lot of portable code and consequently quite a
few of glue layers and there is _always_ something in the Windows API that is
done ass-backwards. From something as benign as InterlockedCompareExchange
taking 'exchange' first, 'comparabd' second, to mother of all clusterfucks -
the IOCP networking model.

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Yhippa
I got a pretty good chuckle out of this.

Cheekiness aside, what's a good way determine how angry your developers are?

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
Talk to them - most developers aren't remiss in telling you what's wrong.

I'd almost go further and say if you don't know without asking you've got an
issue. I can tell you how happy or otherwise 75% of the people working for me
are and hazard a decent guess at the other 25%.

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dear
It's not so much they were "angry" than they wanted to look
"cool/extraordinary" by using those words.

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justjimmy
Interesting…so are those swear words meant to be place holders?

I sometimes use images of friends/TV characters, or even lolcats for giggles.
I guess some developers chose to channel creativity this way…

Wonder what place holders 'angry' designers would use?

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Gigablah
This is not so much "how angry are your developers" as it is "how creative are
your developers at commit messages".

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ErikAugust
Why curse in commit msgs? I usually associate them with happy/getting things
done. Comments however...

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smadam9
Is it not frustration, as opposed to anger?

