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Comment by wyuenho | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but this "feature" is yet another design a hacker living in a bubble came up with. Most people think and program in English, or languages very close to English. In English I can read let x be 4ys and some change. I don't know how to read the arrow. 4ys and some change implies x? If this is a feature designed purely for speakers of SOV or OSV order languages like Japanese, that's fine, but the dominant language in technical discourse isn't one of those.

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> I don't know how to read the arrow.

As a description (which is an easier translation of this idiom into English than an imperative) “is assigned to”.

Imperatively, English tends to prefer verb-object with implicit subject, so we ought to be using a Lisp family language (setq “foo” 42) maps better to English imperative structure than most popular languages that do imperative assignment.

Complete English sentences in present tense are infix, with the subject and object clearly stated. Implicit subjects only follow after the first sentence in a paragraph or a phrase. Case in point is the words you've read so far. "are", "follow" and "is" are verbs. This is why most programming languages are in infix notation. Lisp syntax stayed is a historical accident. [1] Arabic is a prefix languages, and people don't program in Arabic.

"is assigned to" is passive voice. I think we've all learned in writing classes we should avoid it as much as possible because stating the active voice is clearer.

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/icad.html

> Complete English sentences in present tense are infix. . Implicit subjects only follow after the first sentence in a paragraph or a phrase.

This is true of the indicative mood, but not the imperative.

Giving commands in the indicative mood is not typical.

Yes that's true. That's why most languages have infix operators and prefix function calls.

> I think we've all learned in writing classes we should avoid it as much as possible because stating the active voice is clearer.

Writing classes can be misguided.

http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/grammar/passives.html

No, in that example, the TA is very misguided and clearly didn't understand what passive voice is. Passive voice only applies to verbs, and it's often used to invert the object and the subject, occasionally used to emphasis one over another[1]. Unfortunately in English, there are a lot of adjectives that look like verbs in passive voice, examples like "interested" and "motivated" are given in the link you provided. The Edinburgh professor is not wrong either, he just thought every university teaches in America teaches passive voice the wrong way. Not in my case.

[1]: https://www.ef.com/ca/english-resources/english-grammar/pass...

The student paper is one of many examples of people inveighing against the passive while 1) providing incorrect examples, and usually 2) using it. It's amusing, but it's not the whole point:

"The passive is of course perfectly respectable, and there is no reason to try to avoid it. (To say that it shouldn't be over-used, or it shouldn't be used where it is inappropriate, doesn't distinguish it from any other construction or expression.)"

See the tremendous list of Language Log links at the bottom which deal with the issue from a host of angles. I recommend reading some of them - Geoff Pullum, in particular, is usually delightful.

"You should use active voice whenever possible" is bad advice - both active and passive are (nearly?) always possible but often one is clearer - and that can very much be the passive.

"You should use active except when passive is better" is arguably correct but fails to actually provide guidance about when the passive actually is better - which isn't rare.

That the passive is often overused may be useful to note, if that's actually the case.

The sentence "The passive voice is overused." illustrates this tension well. When you omit the subject, (implicitly we all know who that sentence is referring to), passive voice is more concise, but it's not clearer. It's actually less clear because there's less information available. I think this is the distinction most commentator miss.

In programming languages we often find better, we prefer explicitness over implicitness if the language is already designed to be very concise. Case in point: Python.

The passive lets you omit the subject gramatically. In every case, you can include an informative or uninformative subject. If you are including an uninformative subject, the passive is probably clearer.

The clearest is not the most informative; the clearest provides the most important information and the least distracting information.

"Helicopters were used to control the blaze" is no less clear than "the blaze was controlled using helicopters". And, assuming the news item is about the trajectory of the fire, it is much more clear than "Pilot John Smith, having just moved to the area from Baltimore where he attended school with a 3.7 GPA, helped control the blaze with a fire department helicopter" despite that offering quite a bit more information.

To your explicit claim, I contend that "the passive voice is overused" would not be made clearer phrased "writers overuse the passive voice".

Comprehension follows perception

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