I was reminded of "The Story of Mel" (https://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html), which was originally written as prose but got mutated through Usenet linebreaks into something that wound up looking like free verse, and is now remembered as such.

I realized I haven't been to Raymond's blog since this new layout was applied. It was a little jarring - it seems very stark and sterile, and there are a lot of 404'd links. I suspect it got hit in the MSDN blog purge that happened a little while back, unfortunately.

It reminded me of "Hyperion" and "The Fall of Hyperion" by Dan Simmons. The way an AI called Ummon communicates with humans is rendered in a similar fashion.

They've changed the CMS of Raymond's blog at least two times since this post was written. The style of many posts was "lost in translation", so to say.

Sometimes I wonder if keeping the blog up and the permalinks alive is part of the contract Raymond has with Microsoft.

  br { display: none; }

fixed it for me...

I guess Raymond uses a line oriented editor like vim, and the original line breaks have been preserved. If you use one line per clause, it's much easier to change sentence and paragraph structures without having to seek around by the word.