

Hacker Writing Style - ab9
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/writing-style.html

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JohnnyBrown
> 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 ...

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

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obiterdictum
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.

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

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

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th0ma5
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.

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wccrawford
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.

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vog
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.

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wccrawford
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.

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pluies_public
But then, you can't tell whether the sarcasm was intended from the very
beginning of the message or merely the last sentence/paragraph.

~~~
epochwolf
I prefer this method in irc </sarcasm>

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still surprisingly accurate, despite being a decade or so out-of-date.

