This blog is a very informal place for me – I write what I want, when I want, how I want. Thats why I have a blog. Recently, Greg Black took issue with my (admittedly fairly regular) misuse of the apostrophe. I am actually quite familiar with the rules of when to use an apostrophe and when not to, however since this is informal writing, I tend not to proof read me comments and also tend to think much faster than my fingers type. If this were formal writing not only would I proof read my comments to ensure that apostrophe’s were used in the correctly locations but also rewrite those long sentences with many sub-sentences in brackets (I have a bad habit of doing that – it matches my though patterns), and of course the over use of dash’s to tack on additional points. I would probably even go so far as using paragraph’s to delimit separate points instead of using them whenever I feel like some white space is required. Heck, I might even run a speeling checker over it. Its also worth responding to Gregs comment:

Just as we programmers have to learn to spell correctly when we write C or perversions such as Perl or Java, we should also be able to manage to write English correctly.

Actually, I learnt to spell incorrectly when I started programming and have been spelling “colour” as “color” ever since. My writing now naturally comes out as an odd mix of Australian and American spelling’s unless I’m consciously thinking about what context I’m writing it in (I work for a US company so correspondence with customers and documentation should use US spelling’s but I also write for Australian audience’s outside of work). More importantly though, as a professional programmer the most important skill I’ve developed is the ability to read other peoples code even when its horrendous. Most languages will allow a certain amount of leeway on their syntax even if its a really bad idea to actually take advantage of it (similarly, the human brain is perfectly capable of reading a sentence that incorrectly uses apostrophe’s even if its not the best way to write it). When all is said and done though whats important is that the message Im trying to communicate gets to the people Im trying to communicate it to. Since this blog isnt actually trying to communicate with anyone – merely to serve as a dumping grounds for my thoughts and give my fingers something to do while Im talking to myself – its pretty hard to fail in that aim. However, I will try to pay a little more attention to when I use apostrophes, as Ive quite clearly done in this entry. Oh, and if you really want to teach me about punctuation, why not buy me the shirt.