A Norwegian programmer named Vidar Holen lovingly maintains a Web page labeled “Linux kernel swear words.” On it he charts over time the levels of profanity in comments within the Linux source code. One graph shows that the absolute levels have risen steadily; another demonstrates that the number of curses per line of source code has steadily declined. Is Linux getting more or less foul-mouthed? Holen doesn’t try to interpret his statistics.
