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Comment by cabaalis | Hacker News Reader

I liked the article and agree with its premise. But as a side question, why do developers use so many parenthetical expressions?

Those ideas (like this one, which happens to add nothing) are often either throwaway statements (like this one) or are by themselves complete thoughts that should be a separate sentence. (I see this so often in posts written by devs.)

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I've noticed the same thing with scientists. To make an uneducated guess, many people with similar education or social status or whatever really need communication not just as a core skill, but as a primary thing they are responsible for producing. Their peers who produce other things like scientists and engineers don't so uniformly need to hone that skill. I had a zillion problem sets in undergrad, while my friends in the arts and humanities wrote a zillion essays. Likely because of that, I'm prone to writing winding sentences, where (for lack of a better structure) I will, without regard for tangents in the middle of a sentence to address some concern better treated separately, and in a way that will force you the reader to do lots of backtracking since that is relevant here (it's relevant here, so why not write it here?), just nest things wildly. I expect a humanities professor would have ripped that habit out of me.

It's a writing style, not specific to developers. I'm prone to it myself.

At least in my case, it means that I am writing my thoughts into the text box as a stream, and I forego editing the structure once it's written. It happens because I tend to get sidetracked or want to mention something in-passing without working it into the structure of the article/comment.

I'd place it in the hands of habit. We're used to dealing with strange keyboard symbols (like %@*# - and having them mean something). Personally I find that I use dashes far more than any human should while writing (but like others) I do engage in a bit of parenthetical shenanigans as well.

It is easier to use the reader's mental stack (especially if we know our audience) than to figure out a better way to say it (I didn't major in english for a reason).

Nice writing :)

I would blame it as commenting habit. Need to explain everything twice. "What if the reader doesnt understand exactly what I mean?"

So use a separate sentence or formulate your ideas more clearly? I see this so often when developers write. From tutorials to official documentation etc.

Extra words where a simpler sentence would have sufficed, poor structuring of ideas, not splitting text into appropriate paragraphs and sentences. I always feel dumb until I figure out what was trying to be said and then you realise just how poor the writing is.

You should write a post on the parallels between legible code/english.

Yes, that's also a problem I have with my writing. My using of "eg.", "ie.", and other parentheticals (is that the right word?) is equally bad.

It might be because I first write down a sentence, then refine it to become precise like I would when writing programs (thereby making it incomprehensible eg. ruining the narrative flow).

Do you happen to know a cure (or therapy)?

Those are s-expressions. It's an in-joke among the Common Lisp crowd.

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