5 ms·

What is with this guy's aversion to uppercase?

jzawodn 15y ago
Yeah, I guess he wasn't concerned about putting any effort into making it easy for others to read his thoughts. sigh Written text is supposed to be written to be parsed by humans. Why do people forget that?
- bdhe 15y ago
  He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). I remember a study that said people read based on shapes of words, particularly ascenders, descenders and edges (i.e., first and last letters). Does capitalizing the first letter of the sentence make a difference? If it does, do people that read languages like German which has more capitalization (but the same script) adapt to it?
  - Derbasti 15y ago
    How does a German adapt? Poorly. I nearly stopped reading because of that. It freakes out my wetware text parser to have two spaces before punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning of sentences. At least he did not put punctuation inside quotes...
    - xyzzyz 15y ago
      It's funny, because his capitalization and punctuation are his conscious decisions he wrote about quite a few times. He said it is easy to programmatically upcase first words of the sentences, but it is no easy to do it the other way, without losing meaning. Sentences without first word capitalized are also easier to manipulate. I personally have no problem with reading text written in a such way.
  - kjetil 15y ago
    > He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). No, you're missing the point. Naggum didn't eschew all capital letters, only where they led to loss of information (ie. failure to separate common and proper nouns). Emacs and Lisp are proper nouns and therefore capitalized. Common nouns that happen to start a sentence are not.
zachbeane 15y ago
The aversion is restricted to capitalizing the initial word of a sentence. It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized. Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information. It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.
- akavi 15y ago
  Except it isn't trivial; it materially damaged the ease with which I could read the essay. As a long-time English reader, I've internalized the idea that there will be a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. So when it's lacking, especially when the beginning of a sentence corresponds to a newline as in the beginnings of paragraphs in this essay, my immediate mental response is to assume that I've overshot the sentence's beginning, and immediately to backtrack to find it. Overriding this behavior takes mental effort which detracts from the ease with which I can read. Making it harder for your readers to consume your ideas is hardly a trivial issue.
  - jeramey 15y ago
    e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful. Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - tincholio 15y ago
    For Emacs users: (defun capitalize-naggum () "Capitalizes text written in Erik Naggum's annoying no-caps style" (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (aux-naggum (point)))) (defun aux-naggum (current-point) "Recursively capitalize the buffer, moving sentence to sentence. Valid punctuation symbols are [.?!]" (re-search-forward "[a-z]" nil 0 nil) (if (= current-point (point)) t (capitalize-word -1) (re-search-forward "[.!?]") (aux-naggum (point))))
cageface 15y ago
Naggum was one of the net's all-time greatest cranks. He almost singlehandedly turned comp.lang.lisp into a minefield.

Yeah, I guess he wasn't concerned about putting any effort into making it easy for others to read his thoughts. sigh Written text is supposed to be written to be parsed by humans. Why do people forget that?

bdhe 15y ago
He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). I remember a study that said people read based on shapes of words, particularly ascenders, descenders and edges (i.e., first and last letters). Does capitalizing the first letter of the sentence make a difference? If it does, do people that read languages like German which has more capitalization (but the same script) adapt to it?
- Derbasti 15y ago
  How does a German adapt? Poorly. I nearly stopped reading because of that. It freakes out my wetware text parser to have two spaces before punctuation and no capitalization at the beginning of sentences. At least he did not put punctuation inside quotes...
  - xyzzyz 15y ago
    It's funny, because his capitalization and punctuation are his conscious decisions he wrote about quite a few times. He said it is easy to programmatically upcase first words of the sentences, but it is no easy to do it the other way, without losing meaning. Sentences without first word capitalized are also easier to manipulate. I personally have no problem with reading text written in a such way.
- kjetil 15y ago
  > He's also inconsistent. He capitalizes 'I' and Emacs and Lisp (among other things). No, you're missing the point. Naggum didn't eschew all capital letters, only where they led to loss of information (ie. failure to separate common and proper nouns). Emacs and Lisp are proper nouns and therefore capitalized. Common nouns that happen to start a sentence are not.

zachbeane 15y ago

The aversion is restricted to capitalizing the initial word of a sentence. It's easier to rearrange words in a sentence and join or split sentences in a paragraph if the first word of a sentence is not capitalized. Capitalizing the first word of a sentence can also lose information. It's also helpful to identify people who focus on the trivial.

akavi 15y ago
Except it isn't trivial; it materially damaged the ease with which I could read the essay. As a long-time English reader, I've internalized the idea that there will be a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence. So when it's lacking, especially when the beginning of a sentence corresponds to a newline as in the beginnings of paragraphs in this essay, my immediate mental response is to assume that I've overshot the sentence's beginning, and immediately to backtrack to find it. Overriding this behavior takes mental effort which detracts from the ease with which I can read. Making it harder for your readers to consume your ideas is hardly a trivial issue.
- jeramey 15y ago
  e. e. cummings might have a thing or two to say about a thing or two regarding the use of capitalization. It can be worthwhile to overlook or adapt to someone's stylistic peccadilloes if the ideas they have are interesting and useful. Not that I'm casting judgment in regards to that in what either Naggum or cummings wrote! ;-)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- tincholio 15y ago
  For Emacs users: (defun capitalize-naggum () "Capitalizes text written in Erik Naggum's annoying no-caps style" (interactive) (save-excursion (goto-char (point-min)) (aux-naggum (point)))) (defun aux-naggum (current-point) "Recursively capitalize the buffer, moving sentence to sentence. Valid punctuation symbols are [.?!]" (re-search-forward "[a-z]" nil 0 nil) (if (= current-point (point)) t (capitalize-word -1) (re-search-forward "[.!?]") (aux-naggum (point))))

cageface 15y ago

Naggum was one of the net's all-time greatest cranks. He almost singlehandedly turned comp.lang.lisp into a minefield.