Timeline for Why do programmers use 'we' so often?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
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| May 21, 2018 at 22:14 | comment | added | gseattle | Thank you @raoulcousins. I can see the good intentions in professors but maybe not realizing they are conditioning students to do likewise. Pronouns are so endemic, functions will be named like my_rebalance(). Wait, you know it is yours and you know I know it is yours, all those extra characters, think of the electrons. The software CPU portion of my brain thinks it is more efficient without any notions of possession: We, our, my. Professors, please tell your students: No pronouns in code unless necessary. | |
| Mar 16, 2013 at 6:25 | comment | added | user327301 | For research papers there might be a simpler reason. Most papers (at least in my field, and I'm guessing in most science and engineering) are multi-author papers. The natural option is then to use 'we'. I suppose that single-author papers could use 'I', but with double-blind journal submissions 'we' would be consistent with other papers. | |
| Mar 16, 2013 at 2:15 | comment | added | starwed | @Pharap You can interpret it as patronizing if you like, but it certainly isn't how it is meant -- it is used not just in textbooks but papers written to be read by peers. | |
| Mar 16, 2013 at 0:26 | history | migrated | to programmers.stackexchange.com | ||
| Feb 26, 2013 at 0:43 | comment | added | Pharap | That at least sheds a bit of light on things considering the amount of mathematicians that get involved in programming. I have to disagree on that philosophy though, I think 'we' sounds creepy at the least and patronising at the worst (if being used all the time). A very useful response. | |
| Feb 26, 2013 at 0:24 | review | First posts | |||
| Feb 26, 2013 at 0:25 | |||||
| Feb 26, 2013 at 0:08 | history | answered | user327301 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |