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Comment by eeZah7Ux | Hacker News Reader

"The problem is, that sometimes, unfortunately, these tools are just not sufficient, it's still easy to shoot your own foot and get lost in a sea of complexity."

As a non-native English speaker I found this use of commas very difficult to understand. Often I get the feeling that native speakers don't even notice it.

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The first comma is simply incorrect. "unfortunately" does need commas around it, but it could be moved to the beginning for a simpler sentence.

The fourth comma is also incorrect and should be replaced by a semicolon.

"Unfortunately, the problem is that sometimes these tools are just not sufficient; it's still easy to shoot your own foot and get lost in a sea of complexity."

And looking at that now, I would also get rid of "the problem is that". "Unfortunately" and "sometimes" back to back lacks flow, so I would also replace "sometimes" (in this case with "often" in place of "just"). In the original, "just not" has a stronger grouping than "not sufficient", which is why "insufficient" wasn't used. Now with "just" gone, I'd swap back in "insufficient".

"Unfortunately, these tools are often insufficient; it's still easy to shoot your own foot and get lost in a sea of complexity."

Just to aid people who are interesting in looking this sort of thing up, the fourth comma in the original is an example of a "comma splice", where the comma is too weak to join the two independent clauses. You can solve a comma splice by either making the two independent clauses into separate sentences, joining them with a stronger piece of punctuation (like a semicolon, colon, or a dash), or by using a conjunction like "and".

British English seems to be more forgiving about comma splices than American English. One certainly sees them much more frequently in British English.

I suspect it may be more the case that many people under 40 in the UK weren't really taught much at all in the way of grammar, and even people who have involuntarily picked up fairly decent grammatical skills still struggle with comma splices, which are, admittedly, quite a subtle sort of error whose detection is predicated by a full mastery of the purposes of the various punctuation marks and an understanding of clauses.

It sounds like OP is a non-native speaker too. I'd simplify it to this:

"The problem is that sometimes these tools are just not sufficient. It's still easy to shoot yourself in the foot and get lost in a sea of complexity."

(Hemingwayapp is great for making sure writing is not too complex)

"These tools are often insufficient" ?

"These tools are insufficient" (or: are not enough).

A tool that's "often insufficient" isn't a very good tool - by virtue of often being insufficient - it becomes [ed:simply] insufficient?

Native speakers are often prone to different mistakes than non-native speakers. For example "would of" (instead of "would have" / "would've"), confusing "they", "they're", "their" or confusing "where" with "were". a vs an is an interesting case, too.

as the others have said, its incorrect grammar in English.

it would however be correct in German, so that might be it?

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