OpenJDK Bug Report Complains Source Code 'Has Too Many Swear Words' (java.net) 281
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."
Well, for an expansive definition of "bug" (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a pretty wide definition of "bug".
I'd think that maybe they could devote their debugging efforts to more annoying bugs...
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You would think you have better things to do, like eat, drink, work, sleep than comment on a /. story.
Actually not too many people would think that because they'd recognize that we can do lots of things. In your code bases, do minor and easy to address bugs never get addressed on the basis that there 'should be more important bugs'? See how stupid that sounds?
Slightly better than what you and I did (Score:2)
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
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debugging efforts
If running grep to find some swear words is your definition of "effort" then you have no business commenting on how someone manages code.
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What is your definition of annoying?
Well, software that freezes for no apparent reason is annoying, to start.
Re: Well, for an expansive definition of "bug" (Score:5, Insightful)
That people who look for swear words in code have too much free time and too fragile personalities.
Re: Well, for an expansive definition of "bug" (Score:5, Insightful)
What is your definition of annoying?
People who go around looking at code comment sections and bitch about swear words while adding absolutely nothing to the actual code development. That's pretty fucking annoying.
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It is belligerence, the "red site" (soylent) fixed all the outstanding Slashcode bugs, along with quality-of-life improvements, with a single developer over the course of 6-8 weeks.
Bidirectionality abuse (5:erocS) (Score:5, Informative)
Vandals were abusing Unicode bidirectionality control characters to break the layout and spoof moderation scores, which I've called the erocS problem [slashdot.org]. 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?
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just whitelist the most common unicode characters and disallow everything else
Slashdot does exactly this. You disagree with its administrators on which numeric character entities to allow and which to disallow.
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Well, at the very least they could implement a filtering hack so apostrophes are no longer broken, which is the most common UTF-8 problem I see around here. A partial solution would be better than nothing.
Re: Well, for an expansive definition of "bug" (Score:2)
Well I ainâ(TM)t no millennial (see my UID). Sounds like you worked at a place with no code review. Even old school places with any gumption have better engineering processes then you describe, and I work at place that develops SDKs with a C API, uses C++11 and assembly optimises important parts of the code. Macros are sometimes important to extend a language to features it doesnâ(TM)t have natively, but donâ(TM)t take the piss.
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Try following a canadian coder. Variables and function names can't contain the letter sequence 'eh' as that's defined as ';'!
Re: Well, for an expansive definition of "bug" (Score:2)
Parents Television Council (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Yeah ... (Score:2, Insightful)
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As long as they can tax it as health services you bet they'll approve it.
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Re: Yeah ... (Score:2)
Those who prioritize quality in code don't use Windows, Linux, *BSD or any other general purpose OS, except as a text editor. And, frankly, I doubt more than three or four of us use Slashdot.
Re: Yeah ... (Score:2)
Which OS, then, is preferred by those who prioritize quality in code?
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Punch cards
Reasonable approach (Score:2)
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"'We can't win against obsession. They care, we don't. They win." — Douglas Adams
The rot is growing stronger (Score:4, Insightful)
Obviously, we are moving more towards NewSpeak. It seems nobody reads the classics anymore and the same evil mistakes are getting prevalent again.
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Nah, singleplusgood
But I would like to know. what self respecting programmer even reads the comments
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I'm starting to suspect that the compiler doesn't...
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Well what should we do about the religious snowflakes? Perhaps get rid of freedom of religion and as someone above suggested, murder all the religious right wing nut jobs that are so easily offended by body parts and natural things like sex?
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Well what should we do about the religious snowflakes? Perhaps get rid of freedom of religion and as someone above suggested, murder all the religious right wing nut jobs that are so easily offended by body parts and natural things like sex?
That's funny - the people asking to silence me aren't from the right. The people actually succeeding in silencing others also aren't from the right.
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While I personally don't five a flying fuck about swearing in source code and can't really see how it could be an issue when using the JDK in a "professional" environment, you are massively over-reacting.
If the source contained stuff like personal attacks, doxing, or giant ASCII penises that stuff would probably be removed for what are hopefully obvious reasons. So clearly there are already some standards in place that have been widely enforced for as long as modern English has existed, and didn't cause any
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Using their own staff. Hire staff to write code for them that is "professional".
Why should anyone have to worry about their code been '"professional" and what "environment" then later selects to use that code.
Who gets to set the SJW standards? The people who work on the code every day?
A '"professional" who later wants to use that code?
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Linux has benefitted immensely from commercial contributions. In fact the majority of work is now done by people being paid to do it. I don't know about JDK but it seems similar.
Seems that for the sake of retaining a few swear words out of the source that could be a big loss.
As to who decides, I guess it's the same SJWs who decided you masturbate in public, i.e. fascists.
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Comments by the coder aren't the same as comments from random idiots.
Your hypothetical should never happen, as the commenter wouldn't have checkin rights. They could of course fork the project to add their editorials.
Four 'fucks' in a project is not overuse of cursing. Bet there are four messes in there that rate 'fucks'.
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Obviously, we are moving more towards NewSpeak. It seems nobody reads the classics anymore and the same evil mistakes are getting prevalent again.
Come off it, avoiding profanity in written professional communication is hardly equivalent to NewSpeak.
Sheesh, some people just like getting worked up, I guess.
I should mention that IMO this includes people who get annoyed enough about swear words in source code to find them and submit patches to remove them.
Re: The rot is growing stronger (Score:2)
The idea of open source being that if you don't like something, you write fixes. Sorry, the procedure worked entity as designed. If there are undocumented features to it, submit patches.
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The procedure will be working when someone trying to diff for changes reverses these useless edits.
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It will be 'working as required' when the snowflake is ostracised.
Re:The rot is growing stronger (Score:4, Insightful)
Open source is a hobby, not a profession. Yes, there are some people who are paid to create open source software. They can censor their own communication if they so desire, or their boss might force it upon them, but they do not have a right to control others.
IMO if a particular curse word is the best way to communicate something, then they should use it without reservation. E.g. writing "this implementation makes no fucking sense" communicates a very different level of confusion and urgency than "this implementation makes no sense" or "this needs to be refactored asap".
Personally, if I saw that in the code base, I would not remove the curse word until I'm able to refactor the code and make the comment obsolete.
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Open source is a hobby, not a profession.
To a first approximation, no widely-used open source software is written by hobbyists. OpenJDK certainly is not.
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No, its mostly a profession these days. In the major open source projects, the number of people paid to contribute by major tech companies vastly outnumber the number of hobbyist coders.
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Most people are so desensitized to foul language that swear words don't convey urgency.
Re: The rot is growing stronger (Score:3)
"avoiding profanity in written professional communication"
Professionalism is when you hold your work product to a high standard, and refuse to obey unethical orders.
What this human turd is doing, censoring strong language, is _prudery_ not professionalism.
Re: The rot is growing stronger (Score:2)
NewSpeak is what American Republicans, Libertarians and Democrats use.
Those left may or may not, depends on the day.
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JRR Tolkien was a Nazi? You seem to be confused...
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Idiot. The word that matters is 'people'. As you point out, they clearly knew the word 'militia' have just used it earlier in the sentence.
Next it'll be git commit messages (Score:4, Funny)
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."
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Kill all the children... (Score:5, Funny)
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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...".
It's all well and fun until you hit the wrong person. I remember reading a story, it might have been on the daily WTF but I couldn't find it about a guy who called up a coworker about a "child killed" problem. There was just a *click* then no answer... a colleague filled him in, the other type of "child killed" just recently. Ouch.
Challenge Accepted (Score:2)
Just need to work out the style guide for it now, high level is open to discussion.
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You could fork Ook to use whatever word you want.
Heat (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
This is exactly why you should try not to swear (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Case by case (Score:3)
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.
Re: Heat (Score:2)
Badly designed code, comment and corrective action.
Good code should have contracts that prevent breakage from (ideally) compiling or, at worst, passing absolutely any of the tests in the test harness you've got rigged to run on code checked in to the repository.
Good comments should explain what is done, not simply justify it. Code reviews should validate that future changes to the code do not invalidate the description.
The corrective action for checking in broken code, regardless of the nature of the breaka
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And their code won't compile, no matter what they do.
Eventually, they'll give up and go back to reading "Fly Fishing" by J. R. Hartley.
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I always thought the "increase this counter every time you try to improve this and fail" comment was more effective for keeping people away from tricky code. I normally start at 7.
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I've used some pretty harsh language in the context of compiler bugs.
Spending days to discover that adding "assert(sizeof(char)==1);" is needed to force sizeof(char) to be 1 is worthy of a good cathartic vent, IMHO.
Open Source (Score:2)
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..
Changing the word won't make it so. (Score:5, Insightful)
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https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/thomas-crapper/ [snopes.com]
Re: Changing the word won't make it so. (Score:2)
Urban legend, long since... dismissed.
Re: Changing the word won't make it so. (Score:2)
Thank you, Dr Pedant, for that learned and insightful commentary.
Why are the swear words there? (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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And sometimes the underlying reasons are dictated by product management. Like the ridiculous feature they required a whole alternative firmware build for. Ah, such fond memories of #ifdef CLUSTERFUCK.
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We know at least 6 ways to spell it! You just lack emagination.
So: that is English swear words dealed with ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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, ... ?
Re:So: that is English swear words dealed with ... (Score:4, Informative)
No.
Unless you submit a bug report to do so, which will be closed as not enough information, so still no.
I bet you were proud of this comment. Stop it. You're not helping.
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Does Chinese even have swear words? Japanese doesn't, not really. Even on kids shows they say things like "kuso" (shit) because it's seen as impolite but the concept of "words that simply should not be uttered even though they mean the same as other words that are impolite but not swear words" doesn't exist.
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'Du leah lo mo' means 'hello old friend'. Say it to your Chinese associates and coworkers.
That Chinese has no swear words in an oft repeated lie.
Virtuous (Score:2)
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Free software is actually not as virtuous in the political and moral sense. Businesses can be pressured to stop servicing bad people, but free software can be used by everyone.
Professionally? (Score:2)
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.
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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.
It's not about being "unable to cope".
All words are just arbitrary sounds that convey meaning. So what? Part of the meaning that offensive words convey is offensive meaning. They are literally intended to give offense; that's their meaning. Which is not appropriate in professional settings.
There's nothing superior about not knowing or caring (or pretending not to know or care) about the meanings of words.
"Too many"? (Score:2)
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.
Common in all code bases (Score:2)
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.
I've used JDK (Score:2)
In my opinion, there aren't enough.
If you don't like comments... (Score:2)
..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.
Cultural hegemony (Score:2)
Keep it clean, keep it simple. (Score:2)
Not enough blasphemy (Score:2)
For religious reasons I insist source code contains a significant amount of blasphemy. Time to open a bug.
Java should probably be deleted (Score:2)
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.
Usually just one or two devs. (Score:2)
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
What a fucking snowflake :] (Score:2)
WTF (Score:3)
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?
obligatory... (Score:2)
..NOT XKCD.
WTF/m [osnews.com]
fuck them (Score:2)
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 p
What is the point? (Score:2)
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).
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I understand your point, but swearing is still considered immature and unprofessional.
Is it more or less immature than performing deep searches for things that might offend you?
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There are people who are professional and people who act professional.
You are the fucking second kind.
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Re: Dear Snoflakes, (Score:2)
Mankind: zombie process