Swearing in source code points to a healthy and organic development.
this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2025
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OK make a graph of swear words used by Linus and all others against Linus's age. I've a theory.
I quite liked how the original Linux fix for the Spectre-style speculative execution bug on Intel processors was called "Forcefully Unmap Complete Kernel With Interrupt Trampolines", but alas, in the interest of diplomacy it was renamed to "Kernel Page Table Isolation" (KPTI) rather than "FUCKWIT".
Doesn't feel like it was that long ago, but of course, all search results are dogshit in this new age: https://wccftech.com/intel-kernel-memory-leak-bug-speculative-execution-performance-hit/
I never really looked into what they were doing with KPTI.
Assuming it's accurate, that first one is a much better technical description, even if it was intended to spell FUCKWIT
now … how many of those were by Linus?
The sharp uptick of crap flown around 2.6 piques my interest. As does someone's introduction of 'retard' into the vocabulary shortly prior. Must have been popcorn times.
I don't think this uptick of 2.6 sounds fair to be interpreted as a timeline because it stuck around for five years. Also around that time embedded devices boomed, and LTS kept it alive well into 2010s. I bet there have to be a large amount of swears from the later developers tried hard to fix bugs.
I wanna know who refactored all of the fucks out of 4.18
git commit -m "Unfuck everything"
Meh, crap is barely a swear word is it?
Fuck and shit are the only classic swear words on there and shit really isn’t these days.
Moreso than idiot though. It's almost always been considered a swear-word, but if you're looking for a stricter, smaller set, those go by "cuss-words".
I've never considered it a swear word. It's more of a euphomism for "shit". My criteria for "swear" word is whether it is something a kid can say in school with getting yelled at. I realize this may have changed since I was a kid.
How does that compare to the growth in size of the overall code base?
The kernel recently surpassed 40 million lines of code, so there's lots of room to add more fucks and shits.