Does Swearing Boost Open‑Source Code Quality? Insights from a Bachelor Thesis

Jan Strehmel, a student at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), chose an intriguing bachelor thesis topic: investigating the correlation between open‑source code quality and the presence of profanity.

Strehmel analyzed a large number of open‑source projects on GitHub and found that, across multiple statistical tests, repositories containing profanity in their code exhibited noticeably better quality than those without profanity. This does not imply that more profanity directly leads to higher quality.

The research hypothesis proposes that the use of profanity serves as an indicator of a programmer’s strong emotional investment in the code and its inherent complexity. Such investment may drive a more thorough, critical, and dialectical analysis, ultimately resulting in better code.

Programmers humorously noted that Linus Torvalds’s frequent use of profanity when commenting on others’ code in the Linux kernel could skew the statistics, and the study also presented detailed metrics on profanity usage within the Linux kernel itself.

For further details, the original PDF of the thesis can be obtained by following the keyword “开源与脏话” in the “程序猿DD” public account, and the word‑count tool used in the analysis is available at https://www.vidarholen.net/contents/wordcount/ .