I see a number of engineers use broken phrasing like that in posts and presentations and it comes off really badly to others not in on the "joke". Does anyone really find that sort of thing actually funny or additive or is it the equivalent of trite office humor gone online?
Do I personally like it? I sure would not say that I love it, but I do enjoy reading texts that are less impersonal than a press release. Patterns like this can help identifying them, so I tend to be happy when I see them. What I hate, and I feel tempted to claim that all of humanity is with me in this, is when these patterns are used to engineer press release type communication into appearing like something different.
The one thing I would have appreciated from the post is for the author to have written about the "Mor Better Ideas" that make Servo better than Gecko.
To me that particular phrase in this particular post is a little out of place and lowers the tone slightly. I expect that to others it will be seen as fun/human and indicating that the post isn't written by a corporate drone.
YMMV
It's an informal blog, I read the same reference, thought, "must be some joke I've missed", and got on with reading the rest of the blog.
That blog is informal in style but not in content; it's a professional blog by a Mozilla employee. I don't feel like it respects its audiences' time, which is sadly the norm for software-related technical writing. Whings won't get better by saying nothing, and asking people to improve is never a waste of time (if done nicely).
Related: Normalization of deviance in software: how broken practices become standard[0]
Basically, I do find it "additive", but it's obviously only feasible in very informal contexts and the percentage of the audience for whom it is not additive (and possibly quite jarring) might be quite high.
Is this the tone of the whole project? I'd love to contribute, but I don't want to wade through a reddit-comment-thread-level of forced references and memes to do that.
I get the reason for doing it, and I like that the internet isn't full of drab corporate-speak all the time, but this piece just missed the mark I think. The title doesn't really communicate the intent well and instead feels like its trying to be a little clever for the sake of being clever. It's really a two or three sentence press release that got fluffed up with some non-corporate language.
I'm going to have call you out on this. You have no wishes to contribute. Because asking this question reveals you haven't even bothered to look at the repositories, join IRC channels, or subscribe to the mailing lists.
You're here to complain and you're using hypothetical constructive motivations to masquerade that fact. State your opinion without the fussy lie, there was really nothing wrong with it.
The term for the grandparent comment is concern trolling.
The world in general, and personal blogs in particular, doesn't exist to serve people who are "busy".
And being flippant on one's blog has nothing to do with being "unprofessional".
In fact, the blog where TFA is from is not a business or professional endeavor to begin with. So "professionalism" (however some provincial people conceive it) is not a requirement for it.
Not to mention that billions are made in fully professional endeavors that actually include such references and humor (from Google's easter eggs to funny messages in update notes in various apps, etc).
Writing clear, expressive prose is hard! Plus, it's not taught as part of software engineering & it's not required to be a great engineer.
Absolutely not.