Tuesday, June 24, 2003
Classic Jeff Wed, 28 Jun 2000 06:44:19 -0700 (PDT)
I am always amazed at how sloppy many technical people are in their writing style. These are people whose very jobs depend on knowing the exact spelling, case, punctuation, and other arcana of computer languages. They seem to be unable to spare the same number of brain cells to deal with English.
Eric Raymond has written that hackers tend to have carefully crafted, very precise styles of both speaking and writing. Either he is wrong, or this means that most of the programmers I've personally dealt with do not deserve to be called "hackers". I suspect the latter.
Full disclosure: I'm as guilty as the next guy of hurredly tossing off an email without spell-checking it. On the other hand, I am sometimes very anal-retentive and will re-write an email several times before sending it, trying to improve it in some way. I'm sure an analysis of my writings from the archives of this list would show that it is easy to tell which mode I was in at any particular time.
I am always amazed at how sloppy many technical people are in their writing style. These are people whose very jobs depend on knowing the exact spelling, case, punctuation, and other arcana of computer languages. They seem to be unable to spare the same number of brain cells to deal with English.
Eric Raymond has written that hackers tend to have carefully crafted, very precise styles of both speaking and writing. Either he is wrong, or this means that most of the programmers I've personally dealt with do not deserve to be called "hackers". I suspect the latter.
Full disclosure: I'm as guilty as the next guy of hurredly tossing off an email without spell-checking it. On the other hand, I am sometimes very anal-retentive and will re-write an email several times before sending it, trying to improve it in some way. I'm sure an analysis of my writings from the archives of this list would show that it is easy to tell which mode I was in at any particular time.
