Most programmers are only semi-literate; they never learned English well in the first place.

Things like word order, natural language flow, and the basic concept of structuring code like well-written prose doesn't occur to them, because they can't write prose to begin with.

It's all just a string of wierd symbols to them: 'u','n','l','e','s','s' is more characters than 'i','f',' ','!', and thus harder to understand.

I'm no grammarian, nor do I claim to be good at English, but I can't count the number of comments I've read that don't even start with a capital letter, let alone clearly explain the topic at hand. :-(

It's not just foreigners, either. :-( One native speaker who I worked with wrote endless run on sentences fragments, which were often self-contradictory. He capitalized things randomly.

When you don't know what readable prose should look like, everything looks equally readable. :-(

In reply to Re^2: Useless unless by Anonymous Monk
in thread Useless unless by GrandFather

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.