Does Profanity Correlate with Coding Ability?

A recent bachelor's thesis by an undergraduate student from Karlsruhe Institute of Technology suggests that the average quality of open source C code containing swears is significantly higher than the average quality of code that does not. The study used a program called SoftWipe to measure adherence to coding standards and found that code containing swears scored about half a point higher on its 10-point scale of code quality than code that did not. Psychologists suggest that swearing may relieve pain, increase physical performance, and help people shape their personas, but the link between swearing and code quality has not been examined before.