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What? Adverbs are fine; there's no industry-wide dictum against adverbs. I think you might be mad at something different than the principles I'm outlining here. These are accepted standards of technical documentation.
This is basic English grammar, something you should have learned in grade school.
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This is basic English grammar, something you should have learned in grade school.
Your grade school taught you that adverbs are a form of virtue signaling?
Navel-gazing of the highest order.
Backbone.js - https://backbonejs.org Or https://backbonejs.org/docs/backbone.html as code annotation. jQuery - https://api.jquery.com/ Bootstrap v3.x - https://getbootstrap.com/docs/3.4/ Go docs - https://pkg.go.dev/std
While we’re at it, let’s stop saying “add additional“. “Add” means the same thing
"Add milk to that cereal" vs "Add additional milk to that cereal" If that was all I heard of a conversation from the other room, I would form two different ideas of what was going on in that room, hence they can't mean the same thing.
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Your grade school taught you that adverbs are a form of virtue signaling?
No one will fall apart and burst into tears because of an adverb they read in the mountain of documentation we have to read to get the job done. Navel-gazing of the highest order.
One of the best pieces of advice I learned in high school from an incredible English teacher: when doing technical, avoid "-ly" words entirely. It has always been solid advice and has rarely led me astray.
> when doing technical, avoid "-ly" words entirely. Following its own advice, “entirely” can be cut without loss of meaning. Considering the replies you’re getting, perhaps a better way to phrase it in the future would be: > eschew "-ly" adverbs. That way it’s clear you’re referring to a specific subset of adverbs .
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> Nowadays, people seem to be overly sensitive about their code and the way we communicate, among other things. If there's one thing I've learned in life, anytime you see "Nowadays" or "these days" or something similar, you can be guaranteed that whatever statement follows it is a universal truism about the human condition that recency has no bearing on. People are sensitive about their work. And sensitive to how we…
So you're saying people as a whole don't change behavior over time? It's not possible that the average modern software developer is just a bit more sensitive about their work than a welder was in 1950?
At a fundamental emotional level, yea that's pretty much what I am saying.
> It's not possible that the average modern software developer is just a bit more sensitive about their work than a welder was in 1950?
Maybe. It's possible that the selection of 1950s welders consisted of a fundamentally different slice of the overall social profile than coders of the 2020s. But overall sensitivity comes with pride. If 1950s welders had pride in their work I am certain they had sensitivity about it also.
But the statement was "Nowadays people seem to be oversensitive about their code". So you have to compare people who write code now vs people who wrote code in the past. Not two different professions.
Or maybe -- controversial opinion here -- people shouldn't be such babies. I'm looking around the HN discussion here and can't quite believe how personally offended people are by these words. Yes, at the beginning of the first semester at university, hearing a math professor say a step is "trivial", when it was quite hard, was a bit grating. One month in, I realised that the intended meaning of the word was that no s…
This is something editors will tell you, be it for fiction or for technical writing: make every word count, remove the fluff.
As for "trivial" in math proofs, knowing how codified math is, I guess there is a precise use case for it. But I don't usually see math proofs telling me that "2+2=4" is trivial, they just write "4", and that's what the article suggests.
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> avoid "-ly" words I hope this isn’t the actual advice you were given. They are called adverbs.
For non-native English speakers -ly is simpler than adverts. But simpler does not necessarily mean better long-term.
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* He used 'trivialities' in a song (When I Get Home) * She was "just" seventeen (arguably that was Paul's line, but John didn't override it, and kept his name on it) * "(Just like) Starting Over" has 'just' in the title and lyrics. * "Just" gimme some truth. * "I'm just a jealous guy" Rules are meant to be broken, perhaps? Or maybe he would just cop to being lazy?
> Rules are meant to be broken, perhaps? Or maybe he would just cop to being lazy? both? the quote i paraphrased was from hunter davies' authorised biog of the beatles but i still think it is a good rule