Now, I will admit that the dick joke was not the cause of my problems but it was the first thing that put my antennae up and ultimately did lead me to uncovering a lot of problems with the project. That experience will forever make me wary of projects that expose such nonsense either in their public interface or in their code. Save that stuff for your private projects and friends.
In my experience in closed source software swear words tend to point to deadline-driven dread of not getting it right while in FOSS it tends to describe disbelief about third-party APIs and platform bugs that have to be accomodated for.
Dick jokes etc. in Open software just make it a school project... unless it's something like printing a giant dick once a millennium, or a dick acrostic only visible in some ancient terminal default.
At some level, swearing is an indicator of emotional immaturity and a preponderance of subjectivity.
At another level, not swearing is repression, oppresion and a denial of reality and any investment in the project.
So what we want to see in the best projects are the programmers who are emotionally invested yet also objective enough to swear at the real situations around themselves and not repress themselves, but who aren't so emotionally immature as to swear because it's cool/edgy :)
i do disagree with the methodology of the paper though - adherence to standards is a metric of conformance to a status quo, which as someone else’s comment points out feels like the midwit meme
Open source code with profanity in comments is statistically better - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36584464 - July 2023 (214 comments)
Correlation between the use of swearwords and code quality in open source code? [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34761052 - Feb 2023 (59 comments)
Do better coders swear more, or does C just do that to good programmers? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157212 - March 2023 (2 comments)
Higher quality code contains swear words - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34757419 - Feb 2023 (1 comment)