mechanicum 1 week ago

I was curious so I asked Claude how it would do that: https://gist.github.com/waddie/b26166eec6cf675c044c09a95a754...

I thought this bit was interesting:

> TE has no register for hedging, ownership of an opinion, or acknowledging that a reasonable person would disagree. Modality is roughly can / must / do not. […] Where a thought can't be said in STE without becoming a lie, I'd mark it and say it plainly rather than mangle it. Confidence and disagreement are the two things I'd insist on smuggling through.

artogahr 1 week ago

I looked into it a bit more, and while it does look helpful in the first glance, it actually isn't a good fit for code. It's very aviation-terminology-focused.

A better guide would be something like Google Developer Style Guide

  • quinncom 1 week ago

    Or, as the Wikipedia Simplified Technical English Wikipedia mentions, use Plain English or Plain Language as non-aerospace alternatives:

    > The US government's Plain English lacks the strict vocabulary restrictions of the aerospace standard, but represents an attempt at a more general writing standard.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_English

    > Modern corporations and academic organizations hire technical writers already trained to follow a simplified form of English that the layman reader can easily understand, known as plain language (PL).

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_language

    And so we've looped back around OP’s “plain English” phrasing.

dizhn 1 week ago

Nice. It sounds like doing a few passes on industrial product documentation with this might be beneficial.