The Moar You Know

[vostoklake]

The Linux kernel contains the word “fuck” 56 times in its sourcecode.

(source)

Comments

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

But we don't know what's in the code for Windows Vista! For all we know, it could contain a three-hour video performance of "The Aristocrats".

[mainfisch.livejournal.com]

I once had to find a path through the jungle of the source code of an UNIX program called "uucp" - those who have written the code must have been swearing like sailors with hand-carved wooden legs all day long. The comments on their code were like this.

[drquuxum.livejournal.com]

I'm just young enough to have missed the glory days of uucp, sadly.

As if uucp had glory days, really.

I've had a look at the OpenBSD port; the commentary appears...well, it doesn't appear. But at least it's not filth-flarn-flarn-filth.

[mainfisch.livejournal.com]

I think the whole original UNIX uucp had to be stuffed into the bit bin after its main author died in a motorbike accident; and when a replacement was up and running, more modern techniques of communication between computers were on the passing lane.

Uucp was port-to-port communication over a serial line... and it kind of taught us to never leave a crucial software in the fingers of just one single genius. Because the ingenious author of uucp wasn't only swearing like a one-legged pirate, he also wrote some sort of a cryptic "guru style" source code in C, leaving the truly tricky parts of it uncommented.

I had headaches after three months of debugging some parts of the code that had been rewritten for a special BSD version (on reel tapes, for "Integrated Solutions" servers of which only 2 had been sold in the entire Federal Republic of West Germany), but I shot the bug down.