Bitching about the documentation...

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Mon, 05 Dec 2005 19:36:58 -0800, BartlebyScrivener wrote:

> Well, that might be asking a bit too much of the programmers, who
> perhaps don't exactly enjoy mucking about in the lowlands of English
> grammar and syntax.

Oh come on now! For the kinds of minds who enjoy obfuscated C or Perl,
English is just par for the course.

One of my favourite examples of obfuscated English is this grammatically
correct sentence:

"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."

And they say English is a hard language to understand :-)

On the other hand, for programmers who don't like obfuscated anything,
English can be as precise and elegant as anything in Lisp or Python. Treat
English as a programming language: learn the rules of syntax and grammar,
and read examples of master writers to learn the best idioms, and you
can't go wrong.

But if you try to learn English from Usenet... *shudders*


-- 
Steven.