I believe pretty strongly that swearwords are a negative indicator in the long run. It is one thing to voice your frustration internally or when debugging and another to ship them out into posterity, which is unprofessional. I was pretty turned off when I discovered that an OSS tool that I was using in an enterprise environment had a feature name that was also a dick joke. I was forced to use this tool by my employer without proper vetting and it ended up being a disaster. It was widely used in the field but fell on its face on some mission critical basics. I found and fixed a heinous bug due to their incorrectly using the openssl library. Ultimately, this tool ended up being a significant factor in the product I was leading failing.<p>Now, I will admit that the dick joke was not the cause of my problems but it was the first thing that put my antennae up and ultimately did lead me to uncovering a lot of problems with the project. That experience will forever make me wary of projects that expose such nonsense either in their public interface or in their code. Save that stuff for your private projects and friends.
The analysis doesn't seem to have controlled for the number of comments in code. Maybe commented code is higher quality, and comments have some chance of swearing.
Discussed at the time:<p><i>Open source code with profanity in comments is statistically better</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464</a> - July 2023 (214 comments)<p><i>Correlation between the use of swearwords and code quality in open source code? [pdf]</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34761052">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34761052</a> - Feb 2023 (59 comments)<p><i>Do better coders swear more, or does C just do that to good programmers?</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157212">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157212</a> - March 2023 (2 comments)<p><i>Higher quality code contains swear words</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34757419">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34757419</a> - Feb 2023 (1 comment)