I assume English is your first language, hence you should be aware that it is a profanity. To some, that is reason enough. I don't see why you are acting surprised; and it isn't witty in the context of this conversation either.
If offending old neckbeards doesn't bother you, then as a software engineer, don't you think most profanities are incredibly vague and meaningless - to the point where expressing them serve as nothing but a method to reduce the signal-to-noise ratio rather than as a method of communication?
There are effective ways to indicate the whole range of emotions that a profanity may represent. Many witty, precise, nimble bits of communication that can use to delight, shock or enlighten your partner in whatever way you choose.
Profanities, on the contrary, are trite, boring, counter-intuitively childish conversational shortcuts which moreover assumes that you share a common frame of reference with someone else who will "get it", and suggests one doesn't want to invest effort to communicate distinctly one's ideas.
Frankly, your response didn't warrant a long rejoinder (as you probably didn't think it through) but it is such a common response in this thread that I thought I owed it to one of you to at least try to explain why some of us really don't put profanity in our code and try to avoid using it in a professional or personal context.
PS: I don't see the long stream of profanity in PG's essays, do you?
Yes, english is my first language. Yes, I thought it through, and your hand wringing about profanity being imprecise and childish are typical of people who complain about its use. It also misunderstands the purpose of language. Liberal use of profanity is about freedom and tone, not about conveying a precise meaning.
I choose the anarchic language of the people over your prudish, sweaty-palmed nannyism.
> Liberal use of profanity is about freedom and tone
I've noticed many people using "freedom" as an excuse to say or do very (often intentionally) offensive things. That's not freedom, that's an abuse of freedom.
To be clear, I was using free in the sense of "unencumbered." However, since you bring up freedom of speech, I say, what use is freedom if you're not free to offend people?
I really wish I could see how many upvotes and downvotes other comments and my comments have. It'd be really interesting to see some kind of statistics on the general HN community's stance on disagreements like this.
