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Comment by gjm11 | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, and adopted a rule that every time I notice myself writing parentheses I stop and consider (1) whether I can just delete them or replace them with commas and (2) whether I can get rid of them in some other way. I find that maybe 90% of the time this leads to an improvement. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that the same applies to other relatively unusual kinds of punctuation.

Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought".

Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-).

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Remark 1: "sentence/thought" contains "special punctuation" and is indeed improved by substituting "sentence or thought"

Which is fitting, since I consider the use of special punctuation a cheat. I don't hold myself above cheating all the time, and I did cheat. It helps to save time, since a single paragraph can be refined endlessly.

You have to have flexible standards.

I have the same problem. I usually find that not only can I remove the parenthesis, but I can often remove the entire phrase. Usually it turns out that they were just extraneous things that I found interesting with no real pertinence to the rest of whatever I am writing.

Same here. I overuse parenthetical statements like crazy. Once, long ago, I was told that you should only use parenthetical clauses when the sentence will still make sense and give enough information if you were to just delete the clause entirely. So, with that in mind, I'll often just try to delete the parenthetical and move on. If I really care enough about what's between 'em, I'll try to rephrase, maybe by putting it in a new sentence.

"Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-)."

Use of parens in writing is akin to calling a subroutine in code; you're making something of a detour, but coming right back.

As in writing, I found that if a method is getting busy trying to express many different things then I need to break it up.

"Some time ago I noticed that I was using too many parentheses, ... (1) ... (2) ..."

When I try to eliminate parentheses and similar parentheticals, I write separate sentences if possible.

Ho ho. Entirely different sort of parentheses, of course. But yes, the sentence might have been improved by splitting it up so that it didn't need numbering. [EDITED after looking again at what I wrote before, to add:] Or just by removing the numbers.

Oh ... Sorry, but I was absolutely not critiquing your sentence. I specifically was not objecting to your use of parenthesized numbering.

I was trying to jump off from your solution to reducing parentheses, to say how I handle the same problem.

In an informal setting like this, I see no problem at all with casual or bumpy grammar.

My apologies, I should have included the text of your points in the quote.

"Remark 2: my parenthesis-removal rule turns out not to work very well for programming :-)."

This is why everyone should learn Python.

What? Python has way too many parentheses. Why should I have to write foo() to call foo? That's what I want to do with it 99% of the time. Ruby has it right.

It still has many improvements over C. Compare:

void func(x) { if (a == b) { do(c); do(d); } else{ do(e); } } vs:

def func(x): if a == b: do(c) do(d) else: do(e)

I write the first as

void func(int x) { if (a==b) do(c),do(d); else do(e); }

Because how are you going to refer to foo (and not the result of foo) otherwise?

Haskell has it right. And Scheme and Forth of course.

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