On Potty Mouths, or Fuck Those Leaky Abstractions

Reading David Heinemeier’s post, it got me thinking.

In short (my words):

Since the meaning is what important, it doesn’t matter whether you use Curse Words or their ‘polite’ euphemisms. The saying ‘What the fuck is that’ represents an honest question, while saying ‘We should exile all those socially challengedforeigners’. Using Politically-Correct words in an outrageous sentence is much worse than a naive ‘It’s fucking great’.

Favorite quote from David’s post:

…fake euphemisms that are actually much worse than the honest words they’re trying to put a fig leave to.

Anyway, while thinking about that, a (bit far fetched) analogy came to my mind.

Many developers refer to ‘HTML’, ‘DHTML’ and ‘Javascript’ as curse words.

So they come up with euphemisms like Script#, RJS, WebForms and others, and by that, applying badlyleaking abstractions on top of simple things. (HTML and Javascript are quite simple. you can see 13 year old kids that master those, but much less 13 years old master server OO languages).

Funny anecdote:

Writing this post on Windows Live Writer, the spell-checker is pointing out that ‘fuck’ is a misspelled word. One of the fix suggestions though is ‘suck’ … Ha Ha.