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Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

standard.co.uk

41–50 of 109 posts

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#41
post #8

Its just simpler to not worry about the apostrophes. Theyre unnecessary for understanding what a sentence is saying. Im confident that future English will be slightly superior once it has eliminated the apostrophe.

Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code. If I’m in the hiring side and I see a “its” vs “it’s” mistake it counts against you. A higher correlation is with consistency in spacing. The worst coders I met are the one who keep changing the rules about how many spaces they leave after commas and brackets... within the same file.

Consider automatically enforcing your preferred code style.

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#42
post #30
post #29

My instinct is to mock the ridiculousness of campaigning for correct use of apostrophes. Since english is pretty lawless these days and often gets dragged in new and wonderful directions. It seems stupid to rail against the tide of mutable grammar and syntax. But what about the development of High German and standard Italian? Both are examples where, with sufficient resources and nationalism, you can coalesce a dispa…

The think is we dont need them in spoken English, we understand what people mean. Theres no reason why we need them when we write

I would argue that we convey the same meaning during speech by changing pitch, stressing certain vowels and consonants, etc. Things that we can't do in writing without things like apostrophes.

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code. If I’m in the hiring side and I see a “its” vs “it’s” mistake it counts against you. A higher correlation is with consistency in spacing. The worst coders I met are the one who keep changing the rules about how many spaces they leave after commas and brackets... within the same file.

Glad to know the difference between me having money to survive and being jobless will be a typo.

Only if you were right on the border line to begin with.

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#44
post #37
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment reminds me of this classic: http://ashvital.freeservers.com/ze_dream.htm

> In the first year, "s" will be used instead of the soft "c". > Sertainly, sivil servants will resieve this news with joy. Also, the hard "c" will be replaced with "k". Not only will this klear up konfusion, but typewriters kan have one less letter. How would you type "ch"?

tsh

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#45
post #8

Its just simpler to not worry about the apostrophes. Theyre unnecessary for understanding what a sentence is saying. Im confident that future English will be slightly superior once it has eliminated the apostrophe.

You comment does not give any argument behind it.

If both "it's" and "its" are merged, what, do you also propose merging "weather", "whether"?

Weather that is nice, is nice weather.

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#46
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code. If I’m in the hiring side and I see a “its” vs “it’s” mistake it counts against you. A higher correlation is with consistency in spacing. The worst coders I met are the one who keep changing the rules about how many spaces they leave after commas and brackets... within the same file.

Consider automatically enforcing your preferred code style.

It’s not about preferring one style or the other. These developers are blind to white spaces and consistency in general. They semi randomly change style within the same file, even if this is something that they themselves have created from scratch. I had numerous conversations about that with them and they are clueless. Sure they will acknowledge the issue if you point it. However they have the same attitude as OP about apostrophes. They are unnecessary, the code is the same, it’s unimportant and they can’t be bothered... can’t even be bothered to install tools to fix the issue.

Sure. You can automate the white space issue away. But unfortunately the same traits tend to show elsewhere... hence the high correlation between this behavior and the fact that they were terrible coders.

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#49
post #8

Its just simpler to not worry about the apostrophes. Theyre unnecessary for understanding what a sentence is saying. Im confident that future English will be slightly superior once it has eliminated the apostrophe.

Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code. If I’m in the hiring side and I see a “its” vs “it’s” mistake it counts against you. A higher correlation is with consistency in spacing. The worst coders I met are the one who keep changing the rules about how many spaces they leave after commas and brackets... within the same file.

> Anecdotally I found there is a high correlation between one’s ability to write correct English and one’s ability to write correct code.

I have been thinking a long time about it and I concluded it is about one being methodical.

A methodic person tends to put extra attention on (all) the tasks they perform, as well as they are more critic to correctness, and those features combined might make them “better programmers”.

Re: Apostrophe society shuts down because 'ignorance and laziness have won'

#50
post #8

Its just simpler to not worry about the apostrophes. Theyre unnecessary for understanding what a sentence is saying. Im confident that future English will be slightly superior once it has eliminated the apostrophe.

Indeed it is simpler but it changes the meaning of a sentence quite significantly. Correct syntax is important - should I be able to write my C++ without semicolons too?

Next you'll be arguing that we should use "brought" and "bought" interchangeably because they sound similar enough (and it seems everyone I hear thinks they're the same anyway even though they have wildly different meanings).

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