When having squashed a bug in a program, sometimes, one just feels like unloading the stress into a unfriendly, dirty comment like(taken from friend’s code):

//Scratch my ballZ...this ptr gets verified

or, the ever famous

//You have a bug, fuckers

This may make you feel much better in the short run – but on the long run, will backfire at you heavily. Nowadays, almost everyone reads other people’s code eventually. Your code hets reviewed, gets sold or lent out, or gets published in some kind of news source. This can happen to everyone – even a oneman show is not safe from code leaks(made by fatigue, for example when blogging after coding for 6h).

If the code ever makes it online, lawyers and readers alike will rip you up. This happened to me once, trust me, it is no nice experience(here). I didnt get sued, but if the comment would have been a bit more insulting, I wouldnt be writing this lines here.

Overall, swearing in comments doesnt pay out. Get yourself a punching ball, hit your collegue, do anything…but dont write an insulting comment….

P.s. Someone just took a look at the swearing in the Windows 2000 source code – that motivated me:
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2004/2/15/71552/7795

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2 Responses to “Why cursing in comments sucks”

  1. :)

    Once upon a time, when I was still in university, I was called in by professor about my project…

    Some of the temp var I used was named with dirty words in the source code in the project, he asked me did I have any “special meanning” on these var, of coz, my answer is “No”, luckily he didn’t kick my butt for it..

    After that I learn my lesson not to do these silly things in my code….

  2. Hi,
    ouch!

    Best regards
    Tam Hanna

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