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If your English skills are reasonable, it's fairly easy to parse the article and fill in the gaps yourself. Probably easier than a non-native writer wrestling with a spelling or grammar checker when they might not know if the suggestions presented are good or not.

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I agree completely. It seems some HN readers think that if they have perfect English (they do not, sadly), everyone else should rise up to their unrealistically high standards. I guess us programmers are a bit more sheltered from the real world. Add to that the primarily US-based audience, and you have what is called a "hivemind".

I think it's more like Stockholm syndrome. Our compilers are berating us 100 times a day that we're making grammatical mistakes in the language we're using, and we begin to love them for it. It's no wonder we tend to demand a higher standard from the authors we read.

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