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Comment by gritten | Hacker News Reader

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What was ungrammatical about the piece? The lack of capital letters is a stylistic preference and perhaps a reference to Chinese which does not have such a distinction.

The article is in English.

war on the four olds:

- capitalisation

- signatures (already dead, but go check any vintage mailing list archive!)

- private messages (good riddance bulletin boards and forums)

- emojis (sadly resurrected in unicode after being defeated on forums)

thats quite the strong response to what is, in essence, a matter of preference

Communication conventions aren't "just" a preference in the sense that they actually lower the friction inherent in any communication. It may be pretty hard to understand other people even if you use the same conventions to write down your thoughts. It becomes harder when the conventions aren't kept: the extra processing necessary has non-zero cost.

Imagine Debian maintainers releasing a slightly incompatible TLS library because of their preferences.

Debian maintainers do a lot of things because of their preferences that have caused many people to criticize them.

Do you also criticize Shostakovich because he doesn't write in the style of Beethoven?

One could argue that a stylistic choice that slows down the reader is good because it forces the reader to pay closer attention. That is the extra processing has not only a cost but, plausibly, also a benefit.

I would criticize the orchestra trying to play Beethoven, but substituting flute with vuvuzela.

"Do you also criticize Shostakovich because he doesn't write in the style of Beethoven?"

This is a bit more akin to Shostakovich insisting on using some notes that aren't playable on standard-tuned instruments.

"it forces the reader to pay closer attention"

It definitely forced me to pay closer attention, but not to the actual content of the text, but to the underlying grammatical structure. If the author wanted to bifurcate the reader's attention like this, they succeeded.

Right, but if this piece was clearly optimising for something other than efficiency of transmitted information, and that's why it was good.

I feel that this piece was trying to convey some quite profound emotions, and quite successfully so, but the insistence on non-capitalization was just getting in the way of this main effort.

I don't know, personally I enjoyed the general aesthetic the choice created.

Your head might be more efficient than mine in processing text. For me, it felt like a somewhat complicated chore.

I'm now feeling slightly odd that I read all three posts without even noticing the capitalisation.

I envy you. For me, it felt like dragging something a bit heavy across an uneven floor. Doable, but unpleasant.

No you didn't.

Aw man, really? I thought I did, that sucks.

We don't know what the author tried to optimize. Maybe it was for the number of times the Shift key was pressed. Maybe it was for the author's convenience.

What we know is that the author did NOT optimize for: - efficiency of transmitted information - readers' convenience - ease of reading

And this is the exact reason why it was so bad.

If you hold so rigid to the current rules of grammar, you’ll miss out on some truly beautiful works. Many poems, and almost all of Cormac McCarthy.

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