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Comment by genzeddev | Hacker News Reader

I think part of the issue is that for someone who's been writing English for 15 years, knocking out 2 paragraphs of cogent explanatory prose is as easy as ABC.

But for someone who is relatively new to the English language, this can be the source of much anguish and frustration. Doubly so for something like a commit message that is immutable by design. The idea of a typo, a bad idiom, or even worse, unintentionally offensive phrasing, being surfaced for all to see 10 years from now can be a frightening prospect.

I think this whole discussion goes to show the nature of institutionalized privilege, and how seemingly innocent requirements can have a disparate impact on marginalized groups.

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> But for someone who is relatively new to the English language

We decided to structure our front-end application using Atomic Design which classifies UI Components in a hierarchy of Atoms, Molecules, Organisms, Ecosystems, and Pages. Pretty universally the definitions of these terms did not translate to many of our remote developers in other countries not only because of the language but likely they didn't have the same Biology education either.

This and other similar revelations have led me to always put myself in the shoes of anyone reading my code, comments, commit messages, and force myself to use simpler language whenever possible.

Fundamentally, I think you are correct, however my English-second-language friends/colleagues tend to write better English when it's in a structured fashion - like a commit message or in documentation - than they do colloquially. That is how they learned it, after all, while native speakers learn it from osmosis. It's rare to see the ESL speakers use the wrong there/their/they're like native speakers do.

My first full time job was at a university, and we had a lot of student interns, most of them not native speakers (lots of chinese students especially). What I've found is that it wasn't worth the trouble to correct every grammar mistake; if a commit message was understandable and had useful content, I'd usually merge it without bothering to correct botched plurals, wrong prepositions, and other mistakes that the students made regularly, as long as it didn't hurt understandability. I found that getting them to write good content wasn't a problem once we made it clear that this was expected (and it wasn't really easier with the native speakers).

Communication in software development is a huge deal. While language barriers are a thing, I don't think you can or should compromise on documentation, and when it comes to commit messages I don't think this is the leading reason why folks don't write good ones.

I'm told by friends who were at RedHat when they decided to make the source repositories public (as opposed to just throwing release tarballs over the wall), and commit messages went way way up. This tells me: people knew better, they just didn't care if they weren't being held to account.

I can somewhat relate to that, since I am not a native English speaker and it took a while for me to become proficient with the language, but I can say that in the teams I worked in it was mostly a matter of sloppy culture.

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