Comment by parhamn
5 years ago
While I don’t use it for the sake of privacy, folks saying “learn to write” are missing the point of grammarly. It’s an editing tool. Editing is remarkably difficult to do on your own writing. Ask any published author.
5 years ago
While I don’t use it for the sake of privacy, folks saying “learn to write” are missing the point of grammarly. It’s an editing tool. Editing is remarkably difficult to do on your own writing. Ask any published author.
It is especially funny in a community with as many software engineers as HN. Imagine saying a developer who uses a linter or has to make changes to their code as part of a PR review should just "learn to code".
Honestly, that's a thing. The Go "readability" process at Google involved static analysis commenting on your code, and you got "readability" (the ability to approve other people's PRs) when it didn't have anything to say for several changes (among other more human criteria). You couldn't run this linter yourself before it was auto-run, so it did act as a check against making the same mistake over and over again on your own. (I think I figured out how to run it, though.)
This sounds like it's a bad story, but I thought it was a decent system. (I was a readability reviewer for Python, and I wish I was as consistent as the bot.)
I regularly use such tools (usually when writing formal stuff) as I usually mess up my grammar, tense, punctuations and some other stuff.