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by Stratoscope 2681 days ago
The problem with "The most interesting..." or "An interesting..." is that it adds zero signal.

Everything is interesting to someone. So what?

It reminds me of the early days of Macintosh programming when we put "the" in front of all our variable names, like theResource, theWindow, theFile, and theCursor. It was just a lot of noise that added nothing.

Strunk and White got this right: Eschew needless words.

That said, I was glad to see this and read the article. Atlas Obscura has such a knack for finding the most interesting topics!

2 comments

Starting your variables with 'the' or 'my' is a huge red flag. It betrays a complete lack of understanding of why variable names even exist.
I gave an example of signal it gives - it differentiates itself from a landing page. The current title sounds like a landing page.