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Comment by contacternst | Hacker News Reader

"All the services has its advantages and disadvantages over other."

What's wrong with this sentence?

Congratulations -- you've just joined the club of people who've learned that programmers, extraordinarily aware of computer program syntax and having a desire to tune code endlessly, are almost all paradoxically hostile toward any attention paid to their broken English prose.

No, they are just lazy, let the compiler do the checking, a compiler known as HN.

I would love if when I typed a post into a text box such as this one or on Reddit, when I hit reply/submit spelling and grammar mistakes were autocorrected immediately before the post.

A wise man once said: If you want something done, ask the laziest person in the room how to do it.

Another wise man once said: If you want something done, ask the busiest person in the room, and it will be done :-)

A team made by the right combination of those two types will kick asses.

It's derogatory without being useful? Or did you mean the parent comment's?

It's not "derogatory" to point out that a sentence is grammatically flawed to the point of being incomprehensible.

It's grammatically flawed but perfectly comprehensible. Maybe the author speaks English as a second language and missed this one when proofreading.

The individual words may be comprehensible, but the sentence as a whole is very ambiguous and unclear. The most direct interpretation of it is contradictory, and beyond that it's pretty much nonsensical.

I don't think that anybody expects perfect English from people who may not have English as their first or primary language. That doesn't excuse sentences as broken and incomprehensible as the one in this case, however.

And it certainly is not "derogatory" in any way to point out writing that fails to convey whatever idea it was intended to. If anything, that's the best thing that can be done for the author. It's better for him or her to know that their writing has problems and cannot be understood properly, rather than not knowing this fact at all.

Did you really parse the sentence as "The service has nothing but its own advantages or disadvantages over ???other" with no need to backtrack?

I'm sure that if the author of that sentence doesn't master English yet, (s)he's pretty aware of it, and knowing that no matter what people can more or less understand really helps ensuring that (s)he will try again.

When learning a new language it is often difficult to master the little details. Swap out 'has' with 'have', 'its' with 'their', 'other' with 'others' and it changes to:

"All the services have their advantages and disadvantages over others"

Each of these differences may appear significant to a native speaker, but the basic meaning of each word is almost the same.

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