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Comment by Jun8 | Hacker News Reader

Ahh, one of my pet peeves! I like and use the Oxford comma in my emails but have observed am in the extreme minority on this one.

Here’s an English SE question with some interesting answers: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/412/should-i-put....

Here’s Another answer with great visual illustration of the strippers, JFK, and Stalin example: https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/172671/oxford-co....

My other sensibilities include not putting two spaces at sentence end (among other things this shows that you’re most probably 40+) and writing PowerPoint slide titles in sentence case rather than title case.

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I wonder if programmers use the Oxford comma more than the general population. It just feels more consistent to me to have all items delineated with commas (or semicolon if items contain commas: http://sana.aalto.fi/awe/punctuation/semicolons/02.html).

It's not consistent, though. Nobody uses the Oxford comma in a list of two.

In the Oxford regime, "apples and oranges", when prefixed with another fruit, becomes "bananas, apples, and oranges".

If you wanted to implement an "insert commas" algorithm recursively, choosing Oxford requires passing an extra bit along to signal to the terminal case (joining the last two list elements) that there are > 2 elements total. Inelegant to my mind.

If I say out lout "bananas, apples, and oranges", then I have a slight pause between each item in the list and the comma represents that pause.

I say "bananas (pause) apples (pause) and oranges". I do not say "bananas (pause) apples and oranges".

It definitely appeals the my sense of logic and clarity.

I don't like the Oxford comma, because I see a, b, c <-> a and b and c, i.e. the comma is a stand-in for the word "and". Thus "a, b, and c" has a double separator between b and c.

> My other sensibilities include not putting two spaces at sentence end (among other things this shows that you’re most probably 40+) and writing PowerPoint slide titles in sentence case rather than title case.

Yep, guilty on both counts, and over 40. I feel no particular inclination to change, either, since neither seems to be anything more than personal preference. Someone will always disagree, so I just stick to the way I've always done it.

The "two spaces" thing also complicated by the fact that in so many contexts the extra space is simply ignored, as browsers ignore additional whitespace by default and so much writing and reading takes place through a browser or some other thing rendering HTML these days.

Of course you can do things like "pre" formatting or insertion of non-breaking spaces to force their rendering, but that's somewhat rare. I wonder if HN does that? Doesn't look like it.

I find this muddied even more by the shortcut for "start a new sentence" being a double space on mobile keyboards. Seems like a habit I'd pick up even if I'd learned to type on a phone.

>My other sensibilities include not putting two spaces at sentence end (among other things this shows that you’re most probably 40+)

That's a silly generalization. I'm only 39.

> but have observed am in the extreme minority on this one.

The desire to make sentences unambiguous seems to be very rare, so this isn't too surprising.

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