Which part of the above did you have trouble with?

"Citation" is the topic being discussed. It's a technical term that refers to how scientific papers refer to other scientific papers.

"Modality" is the concept I've been introducing for three paragraphs. You're supposed to know what it means by then, or I've not been clear enough.

"Present as" is an intransitive verb phrase. I could say the same thing, perhaps more simply, by saying "you can think of a citation as a modality". Perhaps it's this phrase that has thrown you?

[EDIT: I've changed the article to try and make the sentence clearer. Thanks for your feedback.]

It seems to me that "degree of confidence" is clear enough, and that it's clear enough that a modality can have a degree of confidence associated with it.

So the article introduces two technical terms you're perhaps not familiar with, but I'd suppose someone who can read a CS paper or write a program can cope with that much.

It's the word "modality" that throws me. The word by itself is pretty vague -- "somehow related to a mode". The linked Wikipedia article is dense and confusing. You explain it as a way of modifying a statement. Then you say a publication is an "extended modality". That requires another mental stretch. How does the abstract idea of "a publication" connect to modifying a statement? One expects you to explain that in the following sentences, but you don't really. Instead you follow with the seemingly unrelated statement, "A researcher may wish to state a conclusion: “water boils at 100 degrees celsius”. Convention dictates that he should initially add various hedges to his conclusion: ..." So when writing a publication a researcher will customarily add hedges. What does that have to do with a publication being an "extended modality"? Is it really necessary to use such an obscure term? It seems like it shouldn't be this hard to understand what you're saying.

I definitely agree about the linked Wikipedia article on modality. Literary theory is probably not a good way to talk about modality with programmers, but the idea of modality isn't just about linguistics and literature, and isn't as obscure as you think.

A better starting point for programmers and computer scientists would have been modal logic, which uses the modal operators of necessity and possibility.

For example, classical logic uses propositions. I can say "P" in classical logic. In modal logic, I can say "P", "Necessarily P", and "Possibly P", where logical necessity and possibility are modalities. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_logic -- it's a pretty good overview and it links the logical and epistemological senses of modality.

> You're supposed to know what it means by then, or I've not been clear enough.

I hate to break it to you, but people (especially on a site like HN) have a tendency to skim over text. I hate to repeat myself as much as the next guy, but when you're communicating with human beings it's quite often that you have to beat a dead horse.

The other thing is that the overall sentence isn't necessarily very difficult to read, but the fact that there are so many $10 words gives the impression that it's more difficult to read than it is. So most people (like me) don't try.

With the above noted, I don't know if there's any way it can be improved. Perhaps that's the best way to say it. But those are the reasons others might find it difficult to read.

I find this article to be very clear and readable overall, despite the presence of a few "cultural markers" such as the above language. In comparison with the truly opaque and mostly content-free works of the most notorious poststructuralists, the claim of the article ("assertions about programmer productivity are presented as scientific facts but are not founded on a large body of experimental evidence we expect from such claims") is clearly stated. That said, my own personal experience and observation is that the 10x claim probably underestimates the difference in productivity between the best and worst coders.

Ahem... I really hate to make ad hominem arguments, but when you say things like "In comparison with the truly opaque and mostly content-free works of the most notorious poststructuralists, the claim of the article ... is clearly stated", I have to question if your definition of "clearly stated" is the same as mine. :-)

I'm sure our definitions differ. For comparison, here is a quote from a translation of Guattari's "Chaosmosis" (1992) which I would say is unclear: "The ontological relativity advocated here is inseparable from an enunciative relativity. Knowledge of a Universe (in an astrophysical or axiological sense) is only possible through the mediation of autopoietic machines. A zone of self-belonging needs to exist somewhere for the coming into cognitive existence of any being or any modality of being."

That is the kind of language which made many European intellectuals in the later half of the 20th century notorious. The problem is not just an unusual vocabulary and elaborate sentence structure, but fundamental incoherence and haphazard use of undefined terms. I don't believe the linked article under discussion is really in the same category.

Like others, I'm a little puzzled by this objection to what seemed to me to be a coherent and interesting piece.

I love the self-awareness implied by referencing your own disagreement hierarchy, and humbly wonder whether the following insightful remark may be pertinent here:

“Someone who has a chip on their shoulder about some topic might be offended by a tone that to other readers seemed neutral.”

(It should be noted that DH2 is "disagreement hierarchy 2" - responding to tone: http://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html)

The author has bad style, but he's not writing nonsense. He edited the statement because he was bullied into it, not because it was nonsense.

I would try to avoid words such as "modality"---"qualification" might be better---but the point he makes is clear. He spends several paragraphs defining what he's talking about and then makes a case. It actually follows the lemma, lemma, theorem formula closely. He goes on to offer evidence for his point. Summarized, he says: over time citations can lend credibility to an otherwise unproved statement. He then says programmer productivity disparities haven't been conclusively demonstrated. That might have been a better starting point for the article.

He's guilty of disorganized writing, and being influenced by literary theory, but his point is otherwise legitimate and capable of being proved or disproved. (I don't know how much he's edited the article since.)

Indeed, French is a fluid language if I may label it as such. (note of knowledge: the text is a translation from French)

If I understand the author correctly, "modality" might usefully be replaced by something like confidence indicator or confidence signal (in which case the last part of the sentence quoted by pg could be omitted).