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by lutusp 4493 days ago
I'm amazed by programmers who welcome the discovery of a misplaced semicolon but who object to the report of an egregious grammatical error, especially given the fact that both traits affect their employability.
2 comments

This is a comment thread. The language is informal, spontaneous, largely unedited, and participants come from a variety of language backgrounds. There are going to be grammar differences and mistakes.

You clearly understood the author, as did I and probably everyone else who read the comment. The objection was superfluous. When the commenter took offense and argued, the polite thing would have been to back down gracefully, since the point is entirely unrelated to the greater discussion. Picking on the missed-word typo is just a childish dig.

which/that is not even an error, much less an egregious one.
> which/that is not even an error, much less an egregious one.

On the contrary:

http://www.writersdigest.com/online-editor/which-vs-that

I don't think that outweighs the evidence from Language Log clearly showing that "which" has been commonly used interchangeably with "that" in good English for centuries. This was linked earlier in the thread. Personally, I'm going to go with Dickens and Melville and Orwell (and statistical evidence) over a blog I've never heard of.