Messages in this thread |  | | Date | Fri, 26 Jul 1996 10:08:13 -0400 (EDT) | From | Nick Simicich <> | Subject | Re: Nasty comments |
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On Thu, 25 Jul 1996, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> Profanities in comments are not about _impressing_ people. > > This is all about _communication_. Profanities communicate something, be > it good or bad, and they certainly tell you something about the mindset > of the person who wrote the code. Nobody has been advocating _adding_ > profanities to the code, and in fact almost everybody seems to agree that > at least parts of the swear-words should go. > > HOWEVER, and this is the big thing about this: a _wholesale_ removal of > profanities is just stupid and small-minded. Removing profanities without > regard to the context or the author who wrote them is a LOT worse than having > the ugly comments there in the first place. > > IF this discussion had started with a simple comment like "umm, maybe we > shouldn't be nasty in printed messages, and maybe we should comment out the > 'Fucking Sun blows me' message", then I'd have been more than happy to comply > with that, and a patch like > > - printk("Fucking sun blows me\n"); > + /* Sun _does_ blow me, but the user may not want to know about it */ > + /* printk("Fucking sun blows me\n"); */ > > would probably have been accepted by me on-the-spot. Or maybe somebody could > have emailed David (or whoever wrote that particular line of code) in private > and tell him they found the message in rather bad taste, and ask him to > remove it, and he probably would have. THAT is ok. > > However, it is NOT ok to just act like a mindless robot and just remove every > profanity in sight. That way lies book-burning and "forbidden" thoughts. > Sugarcoating it with "moral reasons", thinking _you_ have the moral right to > suppress others, is the ultimate immorality. > > Thus endeth "Lessons in morality 101",
This makes me want to run out and have a bunch of T-Shirts made up that say, "Fucking Sun Blows Me."
Eat a package of natto first thing in the morning and nothing worse can happen to you for the rest of the day. Nick Simicich-njs@scifi.squawk.com (last choice)-nick_simicich@bocaraton.ibm.com http://scifi.squawk.com/njs.html -- Stop by and Light Up The World!
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