Red Echo

August 1, 2012

Here’s an editorial by some guy who runs a couple of tech startups about the importance of correct grammar and its effect on his hiring decisions. I’m not sure I necessarily agree with this, but it makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside all the same:

If you think an apostrophe was one of the 12 disciples of Jesus, you will never work for me. If you think a semicolon is a regular colon with an identity crisis, I will not hire you. If you scatter commas into a sentence with all the discrimination of a shotgun, you might make it to the foyer before we politely escort you from the building.

Some might call my approach to grammar extreme, but I prefer Lynne Truss’s more cuddly phraseology: I am a grammar “stickler.” And, like Truss—author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves—I have a “zero tolerance approach” to grammar mistakes that make people look stupid.

In the same vein, programmers who pay attention to how they construct written language also tend to pay a lot more attention to how they code. You see, at its core, code is prose. Great programmers are more than just code monkeys; according to Stanford programming legend Donald Knuth they are “essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms.” The point: programming should be easily understood by real human beings—not just computers.