KHB: Dynamic Instrumentation of Production Systems (a.k.a. DTrace)

Posted Sep 15, 2006 4:55 UTC (Fri) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link]

Standard jargon, sure. But this?? I've been in "the industry" for 15 or 20 years, depending how you count, and I've never heard this usage before. My brain kept trying to parse it as some sort of security disaster ("Whoa, DTrace causes root exploits?!"). This kind of jargon we don't need.

LWN would be a duller place if they had to Strunk & White every submission.

See, now that's recognizable jargon--precise, informal, even humorous; it fits right in with LWN's overall style. And until today, all of Val's articles fit in well, too. Many of the contributed articles (and even a few of the regular staff's) don't quite live up to that standard, however. (One of the more egregious examples in recent weeks used commas in place of semicolons and periods--any high-school graduate should be capable of better than that!) Perhaps many of these problems are invisible to those who write the same way, but they're kind of jarring if you've grown accustomed to Jon's outstanding prose.

In short: clean, grammatical writing need not preclude either informality or humor. Spend some quality time with Mark Twain or Winston Churchill or even the Bard... Good examples abound.

Greg