Jeremie Pelletier wrote: > bearophile wrote: >> Andrei Alexandrescu: >> >>> How do you feel about >>> moderate use of the first person in a technical book? Do you find it >>> comfortable, neutral, or cringeworthy? >> >> I think it makes the book more like the product of a person, so I like >> it. >> >> I hate reading 10 research papers where most of them are written by a >> single person and all of them use "we can see" or "it can be seen". The >> first person author has become a ghost. Improving a research paper, or >> science, doesn't imply removing anything human. Using first person isn't >> synonym of bad science. >> >> Bye, >> bearophile > > I totally agree with you here bearophile, even in high school for > certain forms of texts they told us to never use the first person, this > went on all the way up to college and we never were told why its bad. I > really hate that teaching method of "do this, don't ask why." > > Maybe because using the first person sounds closer to faith than fact. > But such enforcements are closer to what religion would do than science, > so its really confusing in the end.
It is the old school image of science as objectivity, where this means that there is no subject: the author should be interchangeable for any competent scientist because texts are produced by methods, not authors. These days such a view is often regarded as a form of faith, and indeed some philosophers see this idea of science as a late incarnation of theism. > What the first person does to me is make it easier to make links with > authors since it makes it much easier to convey emotion, the third > person just sounds like a robot making statements. I know there isn't > much room for emotions in programming books as opposed to the general > roman, but there is still a lot of passion to convey, programming IS an > art after all! > > I guess it just goes in the ever growing bag of rules we all blindly > apply and never understand why. For one, I couldn't imagine this > newsgroup if the first-person was banned from use :) The texts I find most inspirational are mostly witty or lively in one way or another, even if they are very technical. I believe it is because the author is passionate about the subject and cannot help but convey the pleasure they take in it.
