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> Isn't this completely normal in programming?

It's common in academic writing too. And many of those academics end up writing code too.

From Knut's course [1] on mathematical writing:

> But this use of “we” should be used in contexts where it means “you and me together”, not a formal equivalent of “I”. Think of a dialog between author and reader. In most technical writing, “I” should be avoided, unless the author’s persona is relevant.

[1] https://jmlr.csail.mit.edu/reviewing-papers/knuth_mathematic...

My impression is that it's simply from the fact that most papers have multiple authors - so it's a bit incorrect to use the singular even if only one person writes the text (you're speaking on behalf of your "collective"). This carries over to other forms like textbooks

It also functions like the passive voice and makes it sound a bit like the author is less individually responsible for the words he says

My personally impression is that using "I" sounds more honest/direct and less evasive than "we". I've never seen it used outside of blogs though :/

"We" not only might include multiple author's, but can also imply an inclusion of the reader following along as the logic of some argument is made.

In that sense "we" comes across as very inclusive, whereas "I" is maximally exclusive, lowering a subconscious attention and persuasion barrier for the reader.

Example: "Given those facts, we verify our conclusion as follows ..."

I tend to believe that if Satoshi was an academic (well, at very least a computer scientist) the white paper would have been written in LaTeX rather than in the style of a LaTeX article but actually in OpenOffice (at least according to the PDF metadata.)

I tend to believe that someone with the internet notoriety of Satoshi who preserved thier privacy for over a decade faked every single bit of metadata.

The document also looks like crap, so I doubt it.

Fair point really.

I like Knuth's take. Personally I do it to signal, "I'm looking to work with people on this". Some of my hobby projects consequently have notes from my perspective which read as more journalesque.

I agree with OP, this interpretation is reading a bit much into code comments without asking a single programmer the norms of programming.

FWIW, the linguistic notion corresponding to this is called “clusivity”, and apparently distinguishing between inclusive and exclusive we (obligatorily, not via paraphrase) is fairly common outside Europe.

yeah I do it in comments because the present me is not the only one that'l be reading them. Future me is basically a totally different person as far as my commenting is concerned

Hi! OP here, thanks for your comment. Please note that I'm not a native English speaker so probably during translation I might have miswritten concepts as I intended. Let me explain.

The fact that he released the first genesis block on 3rd January 2009 with the sentence of UK Times article is not casual. We can see from the first version of the source code that his network was ready many days before that date. Was he waiting for "fixing issues"? No, he ended up clearly with a release that contained many errors (e.g. amount created in genesis block can not be spent).

> Isn't this completely normal in programming? I only ever use the plural first person in code unless I'm specifically referring to myself as a human (in the same way that academic writing uses the plural).

Yeah, I do agree. However if you notice there are some comments written in a particular style ( with double slashes //) and there are some others written with four slashes. It's really weird to have both styles on codes, unless there are more people (>= 1) that work on the code or that reviews the code.

In addition to this, please understand that none of my content must be taken as the only truth in this world, so I'm open to any discussions about those weird things I noticed :)

Having been a longtime coder in a language that doesn't support Todo tasks (tooling doesn't find them) I've seen double commenting a line as a trick to make them easily findable (it's the fastest thing to type).

It's a personal hack for being able to quickly find them. Ctrl+F //// is a reasonable "Todo" And one which on a single person project I can get away with. Because they are also valid comments persisting past release occasionally happens as (in my case) the second reviewer doesn't know this convention.

Working on a project for the past several months I've left many todos in my code to be reviewed. In most cases by myself when I better understand the problem. I am after all the first person to review my own code.

Thank you for this comment. For todo comments, Satoshi or whoever was used "//// todo: " so it might be for that too.

Personally: I use both!

I've also noticed myself forgetting "Todo:". Sometimes it's the ":" and the tooling doesn't pick it up. If I've really screwed up its "tod:".

Their comments are quite sloppy in other ways, too. They use the `//` on many lines, instead of the common `/* ... */` like:

// Why base-58 instead of standard base-64 encoding?

// - Don't want 0OIl characters that look the same in some fonts and

// could be used to create visually identical looking account numbers.

// - A string with non-alphanumeric characters is not as easily accepted as an account number.

// - E-mail usually won't line-break if there's no punctuation to break at.

// - Doubleclicking selects the whole number as one word if it's all alphanumeric.

//

> The fact that he released the first genesis block on 3rd January 2009 with the sentence of UK Times article is not casual. We can see from the first version of the source code that his network was ready many days before that date. Was he waiting for "fixing issues"? No, he ended up clearly with a release that contained many errors (e.g. amount created in genesis block can not be spent).

Sounds almost more like fair instead of a bug, but nommatter what, time going by between "finishing" and releasing is also more than normal on various levels for many reasons?!

> It's really weird to have both styles on codes, unless there are more people (>= 1) that work on the code or that reviews the code.

Hmm, no definitely no.. either just slacking, or even intentional to mark something?! Maybe you area very clean coder, I do this all the time if not polishing for work..

Could have been so, but deducting like those are proofs is very far fetched .

> Sounds almost more like fair instead of a bug, but nommatter what, time going by between "finishing" and releasing is also more than normal on various levels for many reasons?!

I'm missing something: who says is not normal? Anyway regarding comments and that, the source code is clearly heavily edited and redacted, so I do agree that we can't extract much from comments. I did not understand why HN triggered so much about two/three/four slashes.

> a release that contained many errors (e.g. amount created in genesis block can not be spent)

I was thinking that this may have been intentional.

In that sense there may be a stronger message when creating an unspendable "big" value (reward was 50BTC) than a spendable value of e.g one satoshi.

If one selects code and comments (with //) in most editors, then uses the "comment this block" action, the result is code commented with // and comments with ////. It's more likely this is a result of using a code editor or IDE than a particular style choice.

It seems more some manual stuff: there are ones with three slashes too.

I think in Visual Studio, if you start a comment block with 4 or more slashes and hut return, it will automatically start the sentences after that with 2 slashes so you can write more comment lines. Close with 4 slashes or more to end the block.

////

// Comment

// more comment

// and more

////

As a funny aside, the author of one of the early works on wavelets [1] employed the first person plural pronoun with a footnote on the first page defining it as the “Royal we”

[1] https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1994-2280

If this "we" was meticulously used it might also be that Satoshi was very conscious that this code would have to be ran by someone else who reviewed it before an actual consensus-driven network would arise.

So effectively "we" in this context could be anyone who thought that this code would become law for that network.

I don't even know if I'd go that far. I use "we" a lot in my comments if I need to refer to a person. "We" or "us" unless I know for a fact only I will look at the code. If I am working on an Open Source project, code I know I will share/open source or code at work, I always use the plural. Bitcoin is open source, so very likely "we" just means anyone who wants to take an active role in the code for the project.

I think of the use of we as the team of programmer and computer. I can see people not doing this but I don't think you could infer anything either way.

> I think of the use of we as the team of programmer and computer.

I don't agree because the computer is a tool with no agency like a hammer or a chisel.

I use "we" in program because it's a consideration for the project / team, even if odds are low anyone else will ever use or contribute to it. It's a reminder to avoid factoring in ego too much.

As someone who does this but has never analyzed WHY somehow this description you just provided of the mental model really resonates with me... thanks!!!

Personally I use "we" because I'm including the author (myself) and the reader (someone else or at least my future self, who may hold a very different opinion from me now). I.e. "we" may want something to happen in this function but "I" don't know why this test case is randomly failing.

The author, Serhack, is a prominent developer in the Monero community, and has written a book "Mastering Monero"

Thanks for the introduction! :)

The academic we isn't even mandated style I don't think. You always think of yourself as explaining to a student who is working with you to do the things

Competent programmer seem to use a neutral style '// this thing does stuff' , not '// here i do that so etc.'.

Satoshi is mostly an anonymous group of cypherpunks forums users.

Competent programmers don't write comments.

Yeah, that's a ridiculous generalisation but so is yours. Neither of your examples strikes me as something I'd expect a "competent programmer" (read: seasoned developer) to write. In fact, I find the former more suspicious because it assumes the code is correct (which, if I have to read the comments, it probably isn't) rather than clarifying the intent of the code.

Maybe we shouldn't draw extreme conclusions based on arbitrary details that are neither here nor there. Nothing about the code in the article strikes me as evidence that the author must have been a solo dev or can't have been a solo dev. However my experience tells me it's more likely that it was a solo dev because I've seen solo devs write far more interesting and far more complicated programs than the original Bitcoin stuff and it's harder to keep a secret the more people are involved.