Hacker Writing Style

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html

by ab9 • 15 years ago

55 13 15 years ago

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

It's also getting quite common so see just:

/flame

I can only imagine that's coming from the html-style metadata they are showing in these exactly, but made a lot easier to type for non-hackers. I rather like it myself, even.

vog• 15 years ago

To me, that plain "/flame" at the beginning of a line looks more like a pseudo-IRC. Note that IRC is still common among lots of hackers. Other IRC-related statements might be:

/me is angry|happy|whatever

/join ...

any maybe others. Those aren't used very often, though.

wccrawford2• 15 years ago

Actually, I see it at the end. Example:

I totally love what you did there.

/sarcasm

At the beginning, I'd definitely agree with you.

adambyrtek• 15 years ago

This might be related to the fact that some broken web applications blindly remove angle brackets instead of properly escaping them.

danohuiginn• 15 years ago

still surprisingly accurate, despite being a decade or so out-of-date.

pnathan• 15 years ago

I have found that hacker/programmer writing style tends to be grammatically correct and with complete sentences, as a rule of thumb.

obiterdictum2• 15 years ago

As far as I remember, the distinction between "typesetter" quotation and "logical" quotation appears in computerized typesetting. In traditional paper typesetting, a quote was kerned together with a period (or a comma) into a single character, so that quote is above, not before or after the period.

imd• 15 years ago

I don't know about that. Neither old books I've seen nor TeX do that.

obiterdictum2• 15 years ago

Disclaimer: I don't have a citation for this, I just remember it mentioned a few times, so I may very well be wrong.

JohnnyBrown• 15 years ago

> It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.

Ah what might have been ...

th0ma5• 15 years ago

I recently watched David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose, and given his history in semantic research, and I would equate his style with these ideas. I don't know if this concept of a hacker writing style is a new phenomenon, but more a bi-product of mathematical aspects of language understanding.

Hacker Writing Style

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