Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by flohofwoe 2301 days ago
For a non-native speaker it's hard to tell the two apart. Then and than sound pretty much the same. And even if one knows the difference, it's easy to make a typo.

In the sort of "international pidgin English" that's spoken anywhere outside the UK such subtle differences should just be ignored.
6 comments
Majestic121 2301 days ago
I don't know about that, this kind of mistakes (then/than, effect/affect) are getting on my nerves as well, and I'm definitely not a native english speaker.

Not to mention that this specific kind of mistakes (similar sounds) are at least as often from native speakers as from non-native in my experience/native language.

In French, a lot of people mistake Ça for Sa for example, native and non-native alike

link
ur-whale 2301 days ago
>should just be ignored.

As a matter of fact, it shouldn't: the sentence with "then" in it has a different meaning altogether than the one with "than" in it.

Using "then" suggests that something is done on the CPU and then ("then") on the GPU.

link
heero 2301 days ago
I don't agree, I'm not a native speaker and probably like many, I leaned english by reading so those two words sound very diferently in my head. I'm always lost when I see this mistake.
link
boardwaalk 2301 days ago
I don’t think you’ll get much play for suggesting (to an audience of at least some programmers) that we should allow for more ambiguity in language, heh.

The programmers I’ve met without an eye for detail are usually ones I do not like working with.

link
flohofwoe 2301 days ago
Hehe, true, but unlike programming languages, the languages humans use for communication are "sloppy" and ambiguous by definition. Grammar rules have been invented after the fact to create the illusion that there's order where none exists.

English allows much more "freedom" than many other languages (e.g. German), maybe that's one reason why it has been so successful in the end.

link
dkersten 2301 days ago
If they are just ignored, how will anyone learn? If they really were small (to the meaning of the sentence) differences, then whatever, but switching than for then changes the sentence.
link
galoisgirl 2301 days ago
Speak for you're self. /s
link