UPDATED 13:50 EDT / JULY 12 2013

NEWS

Developers Swearing Over at GitHub

Sometimes even developers get frustrated.

To understand the depth of that frustration, I give you @GItLost–a Twitter feed of developers swearing in their GitHub repository commit comments.

The tweets displayed on this stream rush from the casually profane to the hilariously vulgar. but in the end it’s a sea awash with the unfiltered thoughts of developers at work. To put it mildly, reading the feed swings between ciphers only meant to be read by a small team and the communal cries of frustration of coders everywhere.

From what I understand, it’s been reported that swearing can help ease pain and stress, and out of the many engineers who work with computers, developers suffer a great deal of pain and stress, so it’s probably not at all surprising that they have a tendency to Git commit like drunken sailors.

Sometimes the submitters are angry at libraries, companies, even coding software:

…with ajax and appends to an existing page. If you want the link to be loaded traditionally add rel=”external” to your a tag. fuck u jqm!

fuck vim

Disable ECDSA on OS X becuase Apple sucks.

Perl sucks sometimes

Fucking git

Even git doesn’t escape coders’ ire.

fix ghetto ass timeout shit

changing ‘shit’ to ‘crap’

I’d hate to be “nick”:

nick you fucked up the new lines…

Hey! What did Notch ever do to you?

fuck you notch

There’s more every day. It might worthwhile simply subscribing to add a little bit of entertainment to whatever feeds you already read.

The joy of coding, comments, and coder communication

/*
* You may think you know what the following code does.
* But you dont. Trust me.
* Fiddle with it, and youll spend many a sleepless
* night cursing the moment you thought youd be clever
* enough to "optimize" the code below.
* Now close this file and go play with something else.
*/

Before I took up a job writing about technology and people, I was a programmer for a small company that provided a web service. For code revision, I started with CVS and eventually moved onto using Subversion; but we never did make use of GIt during my tenure there. One of the things that I enjoyed the most was looking through the revision history to see what other coders had said about the changes.

As most programmers might say, it’s an amusement–although not quite as amusing as comments. That’s where the real substance of coder folklore rests, hiding in the source (hopefully) never seen by anyone but other coders. I’ve always seen messages from other coders (often my current colleagues) to be the distilled alchemy of almost-English wisdom that told me things I never knew could even happen in code.

No doubt, open source projects probably have equally amusing commits and comments–although for the most part that’s going to be chained down by a slight sense more of professionalism. I’m sure everyone reading this has seen their fair share of goblins in the comments, but for those who haven’t there’s always the exploration compiled at “Funny Things Seen in Source Code and Documentation” and “What is the best comment in source code you have ever encountered?” over at StackOverflow.

As always, don’t forget:

// here be dragons


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