[rantee]

As someone with a liberal arts degree who also, charitably, is a pretty decent developer, this is spot on. (No disrespect to those educated in different contexts, or those who have difficulty for other neurodiverse, cultural or ESL, or other reasons who excel in other areas.)

After years on non-technical or customer-facing teams, followed by a dozen years in technical roles, I've noticed that my ability to effectively communicate abstract concepts has greatly diminished. This has held even for things I deeply understand at both a micro (the technical details and dependencies) and macro (the business context) level.

Unedited, this comment full of parenthetical statements and loaded with commas, is a prime example of what's happened. Is it due to over-training one's brain to account for all the little details? Anxiety about all that could go wrong? Over-excitement about being on the precipice of nailing something? Or more general cultural trends in the way we process information? Time will tell, unless the Singularity catches up first.

[ilaksh]

Are you sure it's unclear to use commas and parentheses? Is being frowned upon by English professors really the same as being unclear?

Language means compressing and serializing information. Commas and parentheticals are a more efficient way to leave the information in a slightly more compressed state. Generally we are describing a graph serially, and adding the details as we go rather than coming back one by one and zooming in is just more efficient.

Also, I honestly suspect that often people just don't have the detailed level of understanding to be able to add it on the first level. And those details can be quite critical.

I mean, also the actual amount of things that are relevant that they have to say may make their communication seem cluttered compared to someone with a more simplistic knowledge base and thought process.