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Comment by probably_wrong | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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.

Fair point really.

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

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

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