http://www.wired.com/news/news/technology/story/20135.htmlTitle: Technology News from Wired News
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updated 12:30 p.m. 9.Aug.99.PDT |
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Torvalds: Preserve the 'F Word' Wired News Report 10:50 a.m. 10.Jun.99.PDT Warning: Dirty words could be lurking under the hood of your operating system. And Linus Torvalds likes it that way. The creator of Linux, one of the most successful open source programs ever, told his disciples Wednesday not to worry about profanity in the Linux code base. "Profanity and bad taste can be fine," wrote Torvalds in an email sent to Linux developers. "It's usually not a problem, and the only cases where it should be really avoided is in messages to the user that aren't absolutely lethal this-should-not-ever-happen kind." Torvalds, now working at Transmeta, a Santa Clara, California start-up shrouded in secrecy, was responding to a thread earlier this week on a Linux mailing list. Programmers use the list to discuss the software, and Wednesday a subscriber called attention to the discovery of the word "fuck" in searching the Linux kernel. This particular vulgarity surfaces in notes and comments left by programmers to explain a certain function. Such comments typically offer pointers and clues to future programmers who might later revisit and update the code. Sometimes programmers use the notes to express frustration or humor. Torvalds warned against sanitizing Linux code. He said profane lines only become a problem when they begin to hog too much memory. "Trying to be too politically correct is a much worse disease than any amount of profanity, and I'm personally much happier seeing the output of a grep [search] like the above than I would be trying to clean it up in the name of PC." Torvalds said he would refuse to accept "cleanup patches" from anybody other than the maintainers of a particular block of code in the kernel. "I won't do the cleanup myself. I might reject a patch because I felt is was too foul-mouthed, but to be quite frank I don't think I have ever done so." "People have sometimes worried that it is 'unprofessional' to use profanity," wrote Torvalds. "But if you think professionals don't swear you've either been living in a monastery or playing golf your whole life."
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