Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit
An aside: please use proper capitalization. With this article I found myself backtracking thinking I’d missed a word, which was very annoying. Not sure what the authors intention was with that decision but please reconsider.
loading story #43114383
loading story #43118606
loading story #43114856
loading story #43116852
an opinion, and a falsifiable hypothesis:

call me old-fasahioned, but two spaces after a period will solve this problem if people insist on all-lower-case. this also helps distinguish between abbreviations such as st. martin's and the ends of sentences.

i'll bet that the linguistics experimentalists have metrics that quantify reading speed measurements as determined by eye tracking experiments, and can verify this.

( do away with both capitalization and periods ( use tabs to separate sentences ( problem solved [( i'm only kind of joking here ( i actually think that would work pretty well ))] )))

( or alternatively use nested sexp to delineate paragraphs, square brackets for parentheticals [( this turned out to be an utterly cursed idea, for the record )] )

> [I]'ll bet that the linguistics experimentalists have metrics that quantify reading speed measurements as determined by eye tracking experiments, and can verify this.

You appear to be trolling for the sake of trolling, but for reference: reading speed is determined by familiarity with the style of the text. Diverging from whatever people are used to will make them slower.

There is no such thing as "two spaces" in HTML, so good luck with that.

> There is no such thing as "two spaces" in HTML, so good luck with that.

Code point 160 followed by 32. In other words `  ` will do it.

There's: U+3000, ideographic space. It's conceptually fitting, with sentence separation being a good fit for "idea separation".

edit: well I tried to give an example, but hn seems to replace it with regular space. Here's a copy paste version: https://unicode-explorer.com/c/3000

Belying the name somewhat, I believe U+3000 is specifically meant for use with Sinoform logographs, having the size of a (fullwidth character) cell, and so it makes little sense in other contexts.
The extended horizontal size is the only goal here. The dimensions for a sinoform is still related to pt size, so the relative spacing, compared to chr(32), at the same pt size, is reasonably larger.

But...the vertical dimensions don't scale so well, at least in my browser. It causes a slight downward shift.

loading story #43122042
loading story #43121504
loading story #43118802
loading story #43114612
loading story #43118611
Language evolves. Capitalization is an artifact of a period where capitalizing the first letter made a lot of sense for the medium (parchment/paper). Modern culture is abandoning it for speed efficiency on keyboards or digital keyboards. A purist would say that we should still be using all capitals like they did in Greek/Latin which again was related to the medium.

I'll likely continue using Capitalization as a preference and that we use it to express conventions in programming, but I totally understand the movement to drop it and frankly its logical enough.

loading story #43115942
As much as I dislike it sometimes, language absolutely does evolve. Proper capitalization does not fit into this, though. It can completely change the meaning of something if it is not capitalized. It's not just at the beginning of sentences, it's proper nouns within a sentence. Unfortunately I don't have an example of this handy but it's happened to me several times in my life where I've been completely confused by this (mostly on Slack).

This is a merely showing off your personal style which, when writing a technical article, I don't care about.

> As much as I dislike it sometimes, language absolutely does evolve.

Pointing out that language evolves helps to explain how the current established conventions came to be, but it is not an argument that there are (or should be) no established conventions.

If you are speaking in a way that diverges from what most people understand, then you are miscommunication and are making demonstrable errors precisely because the language has evolved into what it currently is, and not something else.

loading story #43118908