Go through a typical college writing class and the teacher will direct you to delete phrases like “I think” and “I believe” from your writing.
I'm all for pieces clearly from a personal perspective. There one can drop the redundant "I think" bits. But often dropping the qualifier turns it from a statement about one person to a universal statement, as with the title of the article. For me this erases the many interesting possibilities in between.
For example, a post title something like, "Which programmers find Ruby more readable than Python?" is way more interesting. The universal is false, but I'm sure it's true for some people and false for others. An exploration of that could lead to interesting ways to think about languages. E.g., is it better for novice programmers? For programmers from non-engineering backgrounds? For programmers with difference cognitive styles or capabilities?
In a world where people (in general) are capable of distinguishing fact from opinion (most of the time), you can omit the "I think", "I believe", "I feel" crap. In a world where people are bad at distinguishing fact from opinion, you can't rely on the "I think", "I believe", "I feel" crap because writers wouldn't be able to use them correctly.
What if you don't care about analyzing the psychologies of programmers, and just want to say why one thing is more readable than another thing?
I do wonder how this style of writing has impacted the psychology of argument, I imagine there are others who read this style of writing and assume it is written in stone or as an objective statement, and not a subjective one. This may just be human nature.
I find it makes for less combative discussions. So I like it.
Eternal September gets worse when their teachers are teaching them bad habits from the get-go.
In your opinion eternal September....
Assuming "click bait", "trolling" and "dramatically" are all either explicitly defined or implicitly defined by consensus or what have you, this would not be a matter of opinion but of fact, so stating "I think" would either be incorrect or would be an admission of uncertainty about whether the fact is true. If he is correct and honest, he has no reason to add the phrase. If he is dishonest or incorrect, he has reason not to add the phrase.
Additionally, in the context of the full sentence, it would imply that the subject pronoun "this" is causing his thoughts rather than causing the object of his thoughts, but I know what you mean. I think.
If I say that halloumi is better than tofu, do you not assume I'm talking about my personal opinion? Do I need to make it painfully clear that it's my subjective opinion?
Taste, as much as readability, are subjective so that can be assumed.
Also, if you read the post, you'll have noticed the author is constantly saying "I find this more readable", and engaging the reader with "what do you think?" questions on each point made, which makes it very obvious that they're presenting a personal, subjective view.
Yes. Because a sentence written in the Arial font, as much as I might find that font distasteful, is more readable than the same sentence written by a Captcha-generator.
A bubble-sort written in Golang is easier to read than the same bubble-sort written in Brainfuck.
Yes, there are exceptions to the rule (I imagine someone who knows Brainfuck, but doesn't know Golang for example), but the rule is very clear in both cases. The clickbait flamewar-inducing headline is saying, essentially, Ruby is the former in the examples I gave, and Python the latter.
We're not junior-high students trying to one-up one-another with cute gotchas. We're technical professionals. We should expect higher standards of communication skills from other technical professionals.
If you mean "I have a useless opinion that no-one should care about," then state it. If you mean "I have statistical evidence that most technical professionals will be able to comprehend programs written in Ruby better than the same programs written in Python," then state it. But don't expect a good reaction when you say the former, while tricking us into thinking you were saying the latter.
I don't. People will care about. Not everybody but some will, and that's fine.
> We should expect higher standards of communication skills from other technical professionals.
Reading comprehension is just as important as writing. I expect my peers to know that an opinion is subjective without me needing to say so.
For instance, I would have expected you to not gloss over my last paragraph on the previous post, just as much as I would have expected you to understand, by reading the article, that everything written there is the author's opinion but I guess that wouldn't have been such a good straw man.
Even the "obvious" counter-example, lying, works because every sentence said by a person is their opinion. You couldn't lie if it wasn't.
The "that's just your opinion, man" thing is the only thing I'd like to see as a universally ban-worthy offense on the internet. It's an entirely empty statement that can be made about anyone who said anything, is always a bitter defense against somebody who took the risk of putting themself out there, and shouldn't be seen as anything but a troll.
And I'm fully aware that this is my opinion, which is why I said it and not someone else.
The author doesn’t do any of this, in fact the author is barely even arguing a point. It’s pretty clearly an opinion piece. Human beings have been writing like this and differentiating between fact and opinion for centuries. Demanding that all writing be watered down to hedge-laden statements and statistics would land us in a very boring world indeed. People can read, judge, and think for themselves. We don’t all approach literature like computers reading instructions.
And the post body reads: "Because that's what they're used to." Fin. Roll credits.
Personally, I find Python more readable, because I know Python better than Ruby.
I don't think there's anything inherently more discoverable about @@ to denote a class field. Python instance fields are all prefaced with self, so a bit of cursory Python learning makes it clear.
But yes it feels weird that you can't declare them upfront. (And it gets weirder when using libs like Pydantic where class level fields are used to describe instance fields in (de)serialised objects.)
IMO, Java's static keyword is far more discoverable because it's far easier to google.
As I discovered when trying to figure out what an @ meant in a TS import statement.
But, I'm not writing a blog post about why Java is more readable than Ruby, because that's just, like, my opinion man.
Often the goal in writing an essay is to share a personal view or experience, and sometimes to get others to share their thoughts on a topic. For example, if you did write an essay on why Java’s static is better than Ruby’s @, it might lead others to engage with you, share their thoughts, and help you learn more or modulate your own viewpoint as a result.
Montaigne, the oft-touted father of the essay as a form of literature, in fact explicitly wrote essays as a means of self-reflection and self-exploration.
This isn’t some technical paper coming from a research lab or standards body, it’s someone interested in a particular topic sharing their thoughts on that topic, potentially influencing others and potentially being influenced themselves.