This is derived from a satire originally published in ACM Computopics and subsequently republished in the Joint Data Systems Support Center house organ, Bits and Bytes, 1:1 (Jun. 88) 9.
For a number of years I have observed that the quality of documentation is a decreasing function of the density of the letter w contained in it. More recently I discovered the reason the letter w has such disastrous effects, and I became convinced that w should be abolished from all "higher level" computer systems documentation (i.e., everything except, perhaps, detailed logic diagrams). At that time I did not attach too much importance to this discovery; I submit my considerations for publication at this time because, in very recent discussions on the subject, I have been urged to do so.
My first remark is that our intellectual abilities are rather geared to master static relations and that our abilities to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason prudent documenters should do their utmost to shorten the conceptual gap from the description (spread out in text space) to the process (spread out in time).
Let us consider the effects of unbridled use of the letter w. This invites including all sorts of complex clauses introduced by "when," "whenever," "where," "wherever," "whereupon," "which," "following which," and "while." It further encourages inclusion of undesirable conditional phrases introduced by "with," "within," and "without." Use of these linguistic constructs demands that the reader establish an extremely complicated coordinate system to interpret the progress of the process being described.
My second remark is that documentation is most readable if stated in simple declarative sentences in the present tense. By forbidding "was," "were," "will," and "would," lapses from the present tense can largely be avoided. An ancillary benefit results from banning w in that discourse is eliminated on many obscure, dilettantish subjects such as "work" (software physics), "words" (metalinguistics), and "waste" (performance evaluation). Unrestricted use of the letter w has an immediate consequence in that it becomes terribly hard to read computer system documentation; it is too much an invitation to make a mess of one's specifications and descriptions.