John Carlos Baez on Nostr: This undergraduate thesis by Jan Strehmel deserves a prize: ...
This undergraduate thesis by Jan Strehmel deserves a prize:
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭. One of the most fundamental unanswered questions that has been bothering mankind during the Anthropocene is whether the use of swearwords in open source code is positively or negatively correlated with source code quality. To investigate this profound matter we crawled and analysed over 3800 C open source code containing English swearwords and over 7600 C open source code not containing swearwords from GitHub. Subsequently, we quantified the adherence of these two distinct sets of source code to coding standards, which we deploy as a proxy for source code quality via the SoftWipe tool developed in our group. We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.
https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf
It cites some previous research:
• Yehuda Baruch et al. Swearing at work: the mixed outcomes of profanity,
Journal of Managerial Psychology 32 (Jan. 2017),149–162, https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-04-2016-010
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭. In contrast to much of the incivility and social norms literatures, the authors find that male and female business executives, lawyers and doctors of all ages admit to swearing. Further, swearing can lead to positive outcomes at the individual, interpersonal and group levels, including stress-relief, communication-enrichment and socialization-enhancement
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭. One of the most fundamental unanswered questions that has been bothering mankind during the Anthropocene is whether the use of swearwords in open source code is positively or negatively correlated with source code quality. To investigate this profound matter we crawled and analysed over 3800 C open source code containing English swearwords and over 7600 C open source code not containing swearwords from GitHub. Subsequently, we quantified the adherence of these two distinct sets of source code to coding standards, which we deploy as a proxy for source code quality via the SoftWipe tool developed in our group. We find that open source code containing swearwords exhibit significantly better code quality than those not containing swearwords under several statistical tests. We hypothesise that the use of swearwords constitutes an indicator of a profound emotional involvement of the programmer with the code and its inherent complexities, thus yielding better code based on a thorough, critical, and dialectic code analysis process.
https://cme.h-its.org/exelixis/pubs/JanThesis.pdf
It cites some previous research:
• Yehuda Baruch et al. Swearing at work: the mixed outcomes of profanity,
Journal of Managerial Psychology 32 (Jan. 2017),149–162, https://doi.org/10.1108/JMP-04-2016-010
𝐀𝐛𝐬𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭. In contrast to much of the incivility and social norms literatures, the authors find that male and female business executives, lawyers and doctors of all ages admit to swearing. Further, swearing can lead to positive outcomes at the individual, interpersonal and group levels, including stress-relief, communication-enrichment and socialization-enhancement