The relevance of grammar

[Monty J. Harder]

"Brian Kelsay" <bkelsay at comcast.net> wrote:

> Hal's right.  There is a known set of grammar mistakes by some technical
> people.  It makes me cringe because of the cruel teachers I had, but at
> least they are consistent and I can understand them when they
> communicate an idea.

  As I said at the meeting last night, when we interface with computers, we
know that we must do so with extreme precision.  If you make a mistake, and
you're LUCKY, you'll get

SYNTAX ERROR

and an explanation of how you used poor 'grammar' in composing your
program/SQL query/whatever.

If you are NOT lucky, your error will be 'grammatically' correct, but not
mean what you think it means.

If you are INCREDIBLY unlucky, your error will be a completely syntactically
valid command that does something REALLY awful like

        rm -rf * .o                    (Thanks to Jim for the example)

We geeks know this.  When we make mistakes like this, we don't claim that
the computers are conspiring against us and shouldn't be so mean.  We know
that it's OUR fault when we express ourselves incorrectly.

So there's no excuse for us to fail to use correct grammar when writing in
English when we are able to do it in C, python, or whatever.