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Discussion on: English in the programming world

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matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

As a native English speaker, I can tell you right now there are many native speakers whose grasp of the language is awful. I can't tell how many times I've had to decipher emails from clients who are successful business people, but who lack the ability to write a coherent sentence.

As noted in Eric Raymond's How to be a Hacker:

Being a native English-speaker does not guarantee that you have language skills good enough to function as a hacker. If your writing is semi-literate, ungrammatical, and riddled with misspellings, many hackers (including myself) will tend to ignore you. While sloppy writing does not invariably mean sloppy thinking, we've generally found the correlation to be strong — and we have no use for sloppy thinkers. If you can't yet write competently, learn to.

Your English already looks better to me than many native speakers, and it's only going to improve with practice. And being multilingual is tremendously useful, whatever the languages are.

If you're writing something and are unsure about how something reads, you can always ask a friendly native speaker to proofread it for you. And there are plenty of tools available to help you write better content - Grammarly is useful for in the browser, and if you write content in Markdown, consider using a tool such as write-good.

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octocodeio profile image
Wojciech Dasiukiewicz

Thank you for your reply :) Writing is not a problem for me now. As you said Grammarly is very helpful. But I need to practice speaking. Maybe I start my youtube channel :D