spelling : Java Glossary

2008-04-06 by Roedy Green ©1996-2009 Canadian Mind Products
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spelling

Programmers tend to be proud of poor spelling and grammar. They think of those skills as feminine or frivolous. However, they are necessary skills for programmers because:

Computer languages require perfect, or at least consistent spelling.
On a team, you will drive people nuts if you don’t use properly spelled variable names because others won’t be able to type them correctly.
Computer languages require perfect grammar.
Computer programs tend to do subtle things. You need to be able to explain to other programmers what they are in the comments. You can’t get away with shorthand that only you can understand.
If you are asking for help, and you make a large number of errors in your grammar or spelling, it may be taken as disrespectful.
If you can’t even spell words like deprecate correctly, there is a tendency to dismiss you as less worthy of attention than someone who can. If your spelling is atrocious, you will may be perceived as too stupid to bother with. I get emails from soldiers with hundreds of spelling and grammatical errors. I can’t help but feel contempt for these people even before they start attempting to justify why they kill children.
One way of looking at it is not that your spelling and grammar skills are non-existent, but that you speak a private dialect that nobody else understands. You are quite likely perfectly accurate in applying its unwritten rules of spelling and grammar. I recall my three younger sisters devised a private language they used prior to entering school. I was worried no one would understand them at all when they reached school age. Even I understood only a part of it. However, it took only a month or two once they entered school to learn standard English.
When you don’t use the spell checker and take the time to look up iffy words in a dictionary, you are broadcasting the implicit message “My time is infinitely valuable. Yours is worthless.”

American and English spelling differences
newsgroup spelling
spell checker

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