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Comment by bsenftner | Hacker News Reader

I have to say, the structure of that article is a perfect example of elitist exclusionary literature. Hang on: the introduction is wonderful, accessible language that most people can read. Then, the very first sentence of the actual meat of the article:

"On a sun-drenched weekday in August, Bletchley Park is the soul of pleasantness: a stately home flanking a lake codebreakers skated on in winter between battling a constantly evolving phalanx of electromechanical encryption machines used to scramble messages between leaders of the Third Reich."

That's a masterwork of elitist language. Drive away every non-explicit intellectual or specific to this topic participate (such as software engineers.)

What a failure of publication. I guess the initial click is all they really care about, because such language drops off 99% of those interested clicks. Fools? Shortsighted? WTF

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If you made it to the end, you may have noticed that the bulk of the story is lifted from a book, which accounts for a change in tone. If someone buys or borrows a book and sits down to read the whole thing, they're expecting a different style of writing from a newspaper article. Also, this is very obviously a weekend magazine article aiming to satisfy a combination of intellectual interest, reader vanity, and curiosity.

I'd say it's more a failure of the educational system if 99% of people cannot interpret a sentence like that.

most people who click a random article from an unknown author don't sign up to read an essay worth of purple prose to get the (actually tiny amount of) useful information teased in the headline.

the OP is right - (virtually) no one is reading all that shit.

I maintain my point: it's prose, not even too complicated at that. The fact that many people have a hard time understanding it, is understandable, but not a good state of affairs.

I will agree that the first sentence is ill-considered (if nothing else it could've been broken up with one extra phrase), but it's really the worst offender. In my opinion the prose in rest of the article is perfectly reasonable. For anyone interested in the subject matter but discouraged by this awkward beginning, I would urge you to press on.

For different reasons I agree the article is trash. There is far too much about Turing and Enigma, perhaps because they are better known, but Enigma is to Colossus as the first airplanes were to orbital rockets, but just years apart, not decades, and without thousands learning from each other.

I know, it's not a great analogy, but what the Tunny team did was so far beyond the Enigma team in terms of a) no prior knowledge of the actual system, b) the development of new cryptanalytic techniques, c) the educated guesses as to how the OKW system probably worked, and d) the sheer brilliance and vision of building a bleeding edge electronic system to do the heavy lifting, that its story, and Flowers', do deserve to be better known.

And the article hasn't yielded the style all the way to the end. It was not fun to read with English being my second language; but I think now that's expected of The Guardian - little information spread out extensively with flowery language.

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