At the most basic level it's just straightforward childish humour, and the use of vaguely-English strings in magic hex constants is hardly uncommon. But it's also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren't welcome. It's especially irritating in this case because Azure may depend on this constant, so changing it will break things.
So, full marks, Microsoft. You've managed to make the kernel more offensive to half the population and you've made it awkward for us to rectify it.
Better than the 0xDEADBEEF we used to use when debugging.
Um, the disparity between male and female coders has nothing to do with “sexism.” It has everything to do with the fact that men’s and women’s brains are wired differently.
Are there some great female coders? Sure. But they’re rare. And many of the top male coders have ODD senses of (yes, juvenile) humor.
This is just reality - something we’re apparently not supposed to pay attention to anymore, at least if it offends the PC (not as in personal computer) gods.
OK, time for a nerd test: who here knows what F3GUM was?
Omg are you serious, or??
Honestly man, you are taking a lib position on this one.
It is any companies right or coders right to use perfectly legitimate numbers in sequence.
To the philosophical and factual point of it, the implication is only in YOUR head. It is completely irrelevant if the coder had it in HIS head at one point.
You’re probably a little bit too easily offended to work in a male dominated occupation like coding.
You should probably specialize in coding talking baby dolls to ensure such offenses don’t come across your eyes.
Yawn. Somebody suffers from boob envy.
“Boob” has more than one meaning. One of them is “simpleton.” The gals can quite properly razz those gutter minded laddies by calling them boobs.
Offensive? Maybe, to the easily offended. I have known and currently know some very sharp ladies in programming. They have just as irreverent of a sense of humor as their male counterparts.
I was at a “Google employed programmers only” meeting at Google NYC once (and I wasn’t a Google employee! Oh no!). Out of about 250 programmers, I could find only one female. She looked like a garter snake in heat with thirty or so geeks following her around. I suspect there were more females, but they didn’t trigger my “look, it’s a female” brain cells.