I've got a small puzzle. I like sentences that are easy to parse. I may speak English "natively", but some words just confuse me and then I have to go look them up and wonder why the writer used that specific word instead of something else that I perhaps have seen far more often.

I've struck just such a sentence in my current branch, www/whyallinone.md:133-136

Quote:

133      Fossil’s feature set suffices for the SQLite project it was
134      created to serve, as well as for many others; is your project
135      sufficiently more complex, such that it needs all of those extra
136      features and their concomitant complexity?

I suspect that most programmers don't come across the term concomitant very often, and I'd like to ask whether "accompanying" or "associated" would perhaps be better fitting (and perhaps more readily understood) here? Though I've read plenty of program code, I never went to university, and wasn't exposed to "high-tier" English prose.

Cheers, brickviking
(Post 40)

One other thing I forgot; in the final paragraph, I must admit to being confused by the last sentence, which is as follows:

222        features to outside systems to flesh out Git’s DVCS-only nature, Fossil
223        can link out to these systems, and they back into Fossil, letting you
224        use Fossil in the same DVCS-only mode.

How does this work, "they back into Fossil"?

Sorry about the confusion.

(Post 41)

How does this work, "they back into Fossil"?

To offer a different example with the same intent: i can hand you a fish, and you [can hand one] to me.

It is admittedly difficult for me to parse that in one go, though.

... whether [other words] would perhaps be better fitting ...?

To me, "concomitant" is close to perfect in that sentence. The complexity is not merely associated; it is a by-product of the extra features. The chosen word conveys that well (to those who know the word or are prepared to use a dictionary.)

and perhaps more readily understood

That's an interesting question. My approach is for API and feature documentation vocabulary to be brain-accessible to a high fraction of the (imagined) audience. But for topics such as are covered by your excerpt, I see no harm in stretching or perhaps growing the vocabulary of some readers. The adjective in question is incidental to the point being made, so nothing is really lost for readers who skim over that word and disdain dictionary use. Many words are learned by seeing them used properly, without the aid of a dictionary. I do not see any reader abuse in cases like this one.

For me is concomitant pretty natural (and almost exclusively in its second dictionary sense), but I admittedly am a Romance language native and had my fair share of pre- and in-university philological exposure. That is to say, you may well change it.

For the second one, you could take the explicit variant: and they can link back into.

Funnily enough, having checked back through the history, it was Warren that wrote it; he must have decided it was an important enough word to use there. So now I'm kind of torn. It's all very well changing things that are actually errors, but in this case, the word usage itself isn't the error, just the reader's comprehension.

I'll leave it in place, as it obviously has enough backing from senior members. I'll also continue on through the rest of the www/*/ docs. Who knows, I might start in on seeing if I can find any issues with SQLite docs. That'll be later though.

Cheers, brickviking
(Post 42 - with 37 rewrites)

I've reworked the second of the two paragraphs you've flagged to improve its clarity.

"Concomitant," however, I will fight to keep. I'm all for clarity, for what use are words for if not to communicate concepts clearly? At the same time, replacing a single perfect word with a phrase made of a number of shorter, more common words with the same overall meaning hurts clarity as well, by inviting the tl;dr judgement.

Thing Explainer was an amusing stunt, not a model for technical communication.

I wasn't replacing one word with a phrase, I was replacing with another word far better understood by myself. Concomitant is a word I think I've seen about once every decade or so in the realms I read commonly. It's about time it had some more use.

Thank you for that rework on the other paragraph, it makes your intent far clearer. I was thinking of ... and they link back into... but that isn't exactly accurate either, as mentioned by Daniel in reply #6.

It's goodnight from me
and it's goodnight from him.
(Post 43)

A percusion instrument shared by two sisters of God... a co-nun-drum.

Sorry!

No, it's a con to relieve the percussionist of his instrument. A con-un-drum!

No, it's any instrument used by a prisoner that isn't a drum:

con - undrum.

(Post 44)