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All the Perl that's Practical to Extract and Report
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-- Jarkko Hietaniemi
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a better sentence (Score:1)
"Like most modern programming languages, R is capable of performing a variety of tasks, but it specializes in powerful statistical analysis."
The target reader for this article has never heard of C or Perl, and probably not Java; doesn't know the phrase "Turing-complete"; doesn't think that Haskell is cool; doesn't know why one would choose one language over another.
What is this reader supposed to make of "by giving them access to various commands"? I guarantee that if I read that to my father, who is a smart man who has read the NYT for his whole life, he would not know what this means.
What does "helps people perform a wide variety of computing tasks" mean? "Helps"?
It's unbearably bad. And I'm not saying from a geek standpoint--it's not that it glosses over some fine distinction that only we care about. It's bad from the standpoint of anyone trying to get information out of it.
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Re: (Score:1)
The proposed sentence added the most important thing about R. In light of that the original sentence is overly verbose.
Not knowing anything about programming, OTOH, original sentence is just as good.
- parv
Re: (Score:1)