No, I will not “Note that.”

Programmers need to learn English.

No hyperbole: if I had a nickel for every time I have read a comma splice in an introduction or piece of documentation, there wouldn’t be a mason jar big enough to contain them all and I would promptly break a Coinstar machine if I tried to turn them into paper bills with it. This virus seems to have originated from Continental Europeans who apparently only gave half a shit about learning English, because “everyone learns it here in primary school nowadays.” This—coupled with their burgeoning anti-Anglo prejudice thanks to the Worldwide Web—has made for a remarkably consistent eyesore in their open source fruits. Also thanks to the Web, this virus has basically spread everywhere now to include Indians, Chinese and even the occasional subliterate American, all of whom write code and none of whom have ever apparently contemplated the content of an introductory college English class curriculum.

Comma splices are small potatoes though compared to the worst writing crime that I have ever seen achieve memetic escape velocity: the dreaded “Note:”. Boy oh fucking boy do programmers love to just cram random bits of absolutely crucial information about some structure or behaviour of their creation in the most disorganised possible way, because their skill is coding, not writing, which is still bullshit if you call yourself a professional. Seriously, anyone gainfully employed has no excuse not to take a midnight community college class so they can stop writing like a God damn tenth grader who’s still mastering the concept of the 5-part essay.

Have you considered making a proper list of specifics and conditions regarding the thing you’re telling us to make a mental note about? It’s pretty obvious that it isn’t just extra information for the curious reader but actually a crucial detail for what we’re all doing here. Does that sound reasonable? Or is this really just reflective of the greater industry cynicism that everything revolves around edge cases, footguns and gotchas, because you’re all a bunch of spoiled sons-of-bitches who want to get paid mid-six-figures to watch Numberphile documentaries on YouTube all day while lying to your bosses that you’re irreplaceable? There are millions of these things if you ever read the docs, and some of you even had the gall to put this out in published specifications from international standards bodies. You’re imposing a middle school literacy level upon people who by placement must be the academic paragons of their fields. What the hell is wrong with you guys?

I’ve written a lot about the scourge of bad code, bad programmers and the great mountain of digital garbage. Seeing that so many of you are also third-rate in writing dovetails intensely with my harsh diagnoses of the meat of things in computing. This sucks and people deserve better.

So no, I will not “Note that” any longer. I refuse. Rewrite your paragraph. I will not give credit for incomplete work.