On 7/21/2013 2:21 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Or worse, just think that you have a lower intelligence level than you
actually have.
I read code, articles, books, etc., all day. There's a million times more
content than I could hope to read. So I (and everyone else) needs some sort of
filtering mechanism.
A common filter is layout, spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, etc.
The more problems there are with that, the more the reader is apt to conclude
"this is not worth my time to read" and skip it. Disorganized, sloppy
presentation is strongly correlated with disorganized, sloppy thoughts, and who
wants to spend time reading it?
Presentation is incredibly important.
Successful authors like Andrei and Scott Meyers spend a great deal of effort
worrying about fonts, colors, margins, etc. (a lot more than I do, which is one
reason why they are better writers than I). These things matter. I bought a
scifi ebook from Amazon a few months ago, and there was a misspelling on every
single page. Every one would drop me out of the "zone" in being absorbed in the
story, like hitting a pothole on the highway. I didn't buy the sequel because it
was so irritating and because I figured the author didn't care about his readers
(there were many Amazon reviews about these misspellings, and he still wasn't
motivated to fix it).
My brother is in the tech recruiting business. He sees thousands of resumes a
week. I asked him once how long he looked at a resume before giving it a thumbs
up or [delete]. He said 2 to 3 seconds. Anything with sloppy formatting,
misspellings, etc., goes directly to the trash. It's just not worth his time, as
there are plenty more resumes where the author did care enough to get it right.
The same, of course, applies to code. If the code is formatted badly, or looks
sloppy in any way, the odds go up dramatically that it is full of bugs. We all
know this, why shouldn't it apply to writing?
And, of course, you can make a style out of lowercase and no punctuation, like
ee cummings. There are always counterexamples! In a sense all of us here are
rebels, as the conventional wisdom is to play it safe and use C/C++/Java/C#.
