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> I've had fruitless discussions on this very site where people will argue that it doesn't matter how you use the language if, ultimately, the message somehow manages to get conveyed.

Most of the time terrible language does manage to hinder the message! But the writer doesn't realize this, because for them it's obvious. I had a coworker (who is almost 30 and a college graduate) with this very attitude. A lot of his code comments and documentation had grammar mistakes and quirks (Random periods. In the middle of phrases.) that made it very hard to read and thus understand.

Agreed - I think the 'its how the message gets conveyed' only applies to really trivial things, like 'expresso', or whom vs who where the incorrect version is so clear that it doesn't affect the readability.

Here's the thing about the "expressos," "irregardless," "for all intensive purposes," and "mute points" out there: Even if the meaning is clear and the communication is successful, these convey a carelessness and sloppiness that, as a great engineer, you don't deserve! As someone who knows what you're doing and takes pride in your craft, things like bad spelling and usage needlessly undermine your credibility.

They do undermine one’s credibility.

At the same time, a cursory study of German, French, Hebrew, even Japanese would suggest that English spelling is needlessly complicated and ambiguous. Part of addressing this problem for future generations is a push for spelling reform.

I've learned a lot of languages and they all have their problems. E.g. the horribly complicated broken Kanji characters in Japanese and Chinese. E.g. the almost completely pointless genders in German, and resulting requirements for other words changing in regular and irregular ways in agreement. Similarly verb tenses are insanely over-complicated. English is reasonably easy to learn compared to many other languages.

It is harder than it looks to fix spelling because in the written language different words that sound the same are spelled differently. Making the written language phonetic would create ambiguity.

> It is harder than it looks to fix spelling because ...

Of what you say and lots of things too. Much of the existing mess is caused by spelling "reform" of the ages past, such as when the Norman scribes half-replaced the conventions evolved by Anglo-Saxon scribes with French ones. It's not very different from https://xkcd.com/927/.

Some things about English are easier than other languages, but it’s spelling is uniquely complicated. There are roughly 55 phonemes in English and 1500 distinct spellings for them. In most languages the ratio is closer to 1:2, not 1:30.

Phonetic writing could increase ambiguity but in many cases will not because:

(a) Many of the weird redundant spellings only show up in multi-syllabic words that are quite distinctive, as for example ti for ʃ in caution.

(b) People often can tell apart many shorter homophones, which are frequently mis-spelled by being substituted for each other: road/rode, or their/they’re/there. The fact they are frequently substituted for one another is a clue to the degree which context disambiguates them.

@ryandrak "irregardless" is a word

that's one of those gotcha words, though, like "inflammable" (contrast w/ "indestructible"), and "denuded".

Do you mean that "irregardless" would have to be one of those gotcha words if it did indeed exist?

"Inflammable" is confusing because it sounds like the opposite of "flammable"; but the sad fact of history is that "inflammable" has meant "burnable" for centuries while the synonym "flammable" was made up recently -- so we are stuck with both.

But as far as I know, the word "regardless" has been around for ages, and that's fine because it sounds like just what it means: the opposite of "with regard". Whereas "irregardless" should be chucked in the bin as a confusing neologism that sounds like the opposite of what the speaker intends.

The word "irregardless" exists, whether you/I/we want it to or not.[0,1] All I can say is that it is indeed surprising how quickly confusing neologisms that should be chucked in the bin soon become sad facts of history.

It's not in the same category as "for all intensive purposes". But that's just the way language evolves. "Intensive" in that case should be "intents and", which, I believe has the same heritage as "clear and present danger", "crimes and misdemeanors", and "cease and desist". All these phrases are redundant lawyer-speak that came about when the law was being translated from Latin to English in the, what, 14th century in England?

So, yeah, there are people who want to _sound_ educated, thinking they'll use a high-falutin' phrase like "for all intents and purposes", they get it wrong and say "for all intensive purposes", and instantly reveal themselves as the uneducated person they actually are. (But only if their present company includes an actually educated person, of course.)

But rather than passing judgment on uneducated folks for using eggcorns[2], it would be more compassionate to reserve that judgment for the actual content and meaning of their speech, and not the superficial form it takes.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irregardless [1] http://www.businessinsider.com/irregardless-real-word-regard... [2] http://eggcorns.lascribe.net/

The "who" versus "whom" thing is a dialectical difference, only worse, in that the dialect which uses "whom" is entirely artificial at this point, and only serves as a class marker. Saying it's "more correct" is a rather nasty bit of classism.

But you could just as well say its six or 1/2 a dozen of the other.

I am some what prone to that as well as a dyslexic but at 10 I had a reading age of 18+

However you could turn that around and say well maybe your reading comprehension skills are not as good as mine.

https://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10435

You can indeed say all of that, but both statements are merely misdirection.

Saying its "six of one, half dozen of the other" is a colorful way of saying mistakes are irrelevant; sotojuan is wrong, they don't actually detract from the communication. But you provide no reason.

As for your reading skills, the subject is writing communications, but from your reading skill you can see the value of writing quality.

err that's not what "six of one, half dozen of the other" means

In this context, yes, it means that written right or wrong is the same difference.

I did a code review for my manager where I reminded him to punctuate and capitalize every code comment. I wonder what review score I'm going to get this quarter.

when a manager complains about oral/written communication they are NOT talking about how you spell things. its things like properly alerting them when issues arise, not being to terse yet not overly wordy emails, knowing what topics are appropriate on conference call and when others can be talked about offline, etc.

i myself am not the best at communication, but those problems do not lie in the fact i didnt bother to use caps in a hn post.

I think that if a developer has problems communicating in their written/spoken language of choice, it might indicate a similar issue with their programming language of choice.

Some managers do care about spelling, grammar, and punctuation. I have a 2nd VP who cares about the colors on the charts and graphs delivered to him.

well charts/graphs delivered to management is an entirely different skill set / topic. slack/emails/comments is a different story. i myself would be happy to see any documentation, and something more than: # this function calculates x def calculatesX():

I'm not sure if you are just going off on a tangent or just completely missed greedo's point.

If you can't write in your mother tongue properly you probably can't code properly either.

they are two completely different skill sets, and i think on some level you must know that, or have no idea what coding is. Not just different, but orthogonal. When one is good at one, they tend to be worse at the other.

disagree.

writing creatively or with nuance is definitely an orthogonal skill to coding, but understanding and following grammar rules requires a very similar syntax-parsing ability to that which is required to write code that will compile. unless you struggle to get simple programs to compile, you very likely have the ability to write with proper grammar, assuming you are willing to make the effort.

I would even argue that the skill of technical writing, where precision and compactness are valued over creative flourish, maps very closely onto the same skills needed for good program design and clean coding style.

I think you hit an extremely important point: communication skills (both written, oral and even nonverbal) are EXTREMELY important for most engineers, even though most software folks tend to not concern themselves with that too much. I understood this real early and it has helped me progress a lot not just in my career but in personal life as well (turns out good communication skills lead to healthy relationships... who knew? :) )

One experience that really change my life in many ways was writing a Masters Thesis under an advisor who was anal about explaining the ideas well and about eliminating typos and such. I found it very frustrating at first but I think overall it trained me to pay attention to what I say and write to try and be as clear as possible.

While there is a subset of people who are quite bothered by minor typos and grammar errors, most people read right over them. Which is fortunate given that I type into this site in my phone.

Poor reading comprehension is much more of an issue. Even assuming reading happens is a generous assumption given how often people clearly only read the headlines of stories.