Programming is an act of control — until it isn’t.
The computer was supposed to be on my side. That was the agreement. I typed commands, and it obeyed. Simple.
But like most relationships built on blind obedience, this one was destined for trouble. We’d been dancing this dance for years — me believing I was in control, the machine letting me believe it.
Then, one night, the illusion shattered. Three in the morning, my desk lamp casting harsh shadows over empty coffee cups and crumpled sticky notes. The glow of the screen burned my eyes as error messages stacked up like digital accusations.
The cause? A missing semicolon. One microscopic punctuation mark had brought my entire program, and with it, my illusion of control, crashing down.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard, trembling between fixing the issue and introducing my laptop to the business end of a baseball bat. Then, without thinking, I did what humans have done since the dawn of frustration: I swore at it. Loudly. Creatively. With feeling.
And in that moment, something clicked. The relationship between humans and machines isn’t just about logic and precision.
It’s about frustration, exhaustion, and the kind of suffering that makes people talk to inanimate objects like spurned lovers.
The poetry of pain
Programming sells itself as pure logic — a pristine world of ones and zeros where emotion has no place. That’s the myth Silicon Valley whispers in coding bootcamps and venture capital pitches: technology as the great rational savior, ascending beyond messy human feelings.
But anyone who’s spent a night untangling an infinite loop knows better. Code may be built on logic, but it’s written by human beings. Frustrated, exhausted, occasionally unhinged human beings trying to express their ideas in a language that pretends to have no room for emotion.
It’s not just a job; it’s a war. A grinding battle against a machine that sees everything, forgets nothing, and punishes the smallest misstep with surgical cruelty. Programmers don’t just curse at their computers. They curse inside them.
Last month, debugging a particularly nasty piece of code, I found myself writing:
// WHY WON’T YOU JUST FUCKING WORK?
I left it there, buried in the comments, a digital timestamp of despair.
Later, showing the code to a colleague, I started to delete it. She stopped me.
“Leave it,” she said. “It’s documentation.”
She wasn’t wrong. That outburst wasn’t just emotional debris — it was a battle scar. A record of the struggle. Proof that a real person fought here.
The science of swearing
Curious about my own coding profanity, I started digging into the phenomenon. A developer named Andrew Vos had already beaten me to it. He analyzed a million GitHub commit messages — those little notes developers write when uploading their work — searching for profanity.
The results? Programmers swear a lot. And it’s not random. C++ developers cursed more than Ruby programmers. Backend engineers swore differently than frontend engineers. The more brutal the language, the more colorful the vocabulary.
Reading through the messages felt like opening a diary of digital despair:
“Dunno how the fuck this was working before…”
“Fixing shit I broke”
“fuck it. let’s release”
But the most interesting part wasn’t just the swearing. It was the quality. Jan Strehmel, an undergraduate at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, did his own research and found that code containing profanity often scored higher on quality metrics than “clean” code.
The developers who cared enough to curse also cared enough to get it right.
The human element
During my first programming job, I was taught to write “clean, professional code.” That meant no jokes in the comments, no creative variable names, and definitely no swearing.
But code never writes itself. Behind every function and feature is a person who fought through frustration, celebrated tiny victories, and yes, occasionally cussed out their own creation.
These moments of humanity aren’t flaws — they’re proof of the craft behind the code. I think about this now when reviewing others’ work. Those little outbursts tell a story.
They show where someone struggled, where they refused to settle for “good enough,” where they pushed through frustration and found a better solution.
It’s the frustration that makes the work better.
Finding balance
None of this means codebases should turn into profanity-ridden manifestos. Professionalism matters. But maybe the definition of professionalism needs to include a little room for being human.
A well-placed curse in the comments can serve as a warning sign to future developers: “Here be dragons.”
It’s like the notes medieval mapmakers used to leave at the edges of their charts. It says: someone has been here before, they suffered, proceed with caution.
Last night, I was back at my desk, fighting with another bug. The error messages were piling up. My patience was wearing thin. The urge to swear was rising.
But this time, it wasn’t just frustration. It was ritual. A recognition that my anger, my struggle, my very human response to this inhuman task wasn’t something to hide — it was part of the process itself.
Like a poet searching for the perfect word, I carefully crafted my comment:
// Dear future developer,
// If you’re reading this, something has gone terribly wrong.
// I spent six hours making this work. It’s held together with
// duct tape and wishful thinking. Good fucking luck.
I left it there, a little piece of humanity in the machine. Not just documentation or warning, but a small rebellion against the myth of pure rationality. A reminder that in our rush to build a world of perfect logic, we shouldn’t lose sight of the beautiful imperfection that makes us human.
Because sometimes, in the space between logic and emotion, between the ones and zeros, a well-placed curse word is exactly what the code needs.
