> the English is appalling

The reason is that the article is a poor Russian to English translation. http://habrahabr.ru/post/217545/

In fact most of the articles on that site are translated from that Russian community blog without any reference to the original authors, the design and structure are also copied and in fact that's not the first English clon of habrahabr.

In fact it's a good thing that someone translates those posts, as habrahabr is a really big community and sometimes there are articles which provide unique information that can't be found in English. But at least they should reference original authors and mark the posts as translation.