To be honest, I don't think (and I'm going off the author's name) that english is his first language. Personally, I posted this to HN as it succinctly gave me a quick overview of MR.

I try not to judge an article/blog post on the quality of the grammar when the ideas they are trying to convey are solid and useful.

There are some exceptionally fantastic minds out there that are able to succinctly explain, sometimes difficult, subjects.

I appreciate them for at least trying, and if they explained it in a language that is not their first language, all the more respect to them.

Perfectionist much?

While I can agree that pointing out the spelling and/or grammar mistakes could be constructive, calling the article "un-shareable" because of them seems terribly over-the-top.

Unless you're already familiar with the material, spelling and grammar lends credibility to the content of the article. Similar to a code smell, it makes you ask "are you sure you know what you're doing?"

While I agree that numerous spelling and grammar mistakes can indicate a lack of maturity in writing skills, I also know that some of the most brilliant people I've ever worked with were absolutely terrible at spelling. One guy in particular was an amazing programmer. He produced libraries of code that were fast, efficient, and easy to read and understand. They were also very well documented. I know, because I went through the documentation and fixed the dozens and dozens of spelling errors. If I didn't know otherwise, I'd have thought he made a game out of how poorly he spelled words.

I can appreciate numerous spelling/grammar errors making you analyze an article with a bit more scrutiny. However, I can't think of a single example of an article with those kind of errors where I couldn't figure out from the content whether I thought the author really knew what they were talking about.

At any rate, I think there is a big difference between an article needing a little bit more scrutiny, and the article being "unsharable".

Just my personal opinion, no disrespect intended. I have personally authored posts that needed a bit more time on the proofreading table and I did worry that people would question my authority on the subject due to grammatical errors in the article.

Fair enough.

Just to be clear, I don't want to give the impression that I don't think spelling/grammar matter (even for blog posts). I just think it is easy to get so pedantic about it that you place far too much weight on them.

I have my own set of pet peeves, and am probably guilty of allowing the violation of one of them to taint my view of an article too quickly and too often.

And of course, there are always those articles that are so bad grammatically that it looks like a first-grader wrote them (but I don't think that's the kind of article we were discussing).

The only place I noticed spelling errors was in the email from the CEO... and spelling errors there seemed to fit.