> It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of the great tradition of personal letters as art.

Ah what might have been ...

I have found that hacker/programmer writing style tends to be grammatically correct and with complete sentences, as a rule of thumb.

As far as I remember, the distinction between "typesetter" quotation and "logical" quotation appears in computerized typesetting. In traditional paper typesetting, a quote was kerned together with a period (or a comma) into a single character, so that quote is above, not before or after the period.

I don't know about that. Neither old books I've seen nor TeX do that.

Disclaimer: I don't have a citation for this, I just remember it mentioned a few times, so I may very well be wrong.

I recently watched David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose, and given his history in semantic research, and I would equate his style with these ideas. I don't know if this concept of a hacker writing style is a new phenomenon, but more a bi-product of mathematical aspects of language understanding.

It's also getting quite common so see just:

/flame

I can only imagine that's coming from the html-style metadata they are showing in these exactly, but made a lot easier to type for non-hackers. I rather like it myself, even.

This might be related to the fact that some broken web applications blindly remove angle brackets instead of properly escaping them.

To me, that plain "/flame" at the beginning of a line looks more like a pseudo-IRC. Note that IRC is still common among lots of hackers. Other IRC-related statements might be:

/me is angry|happy|whatever

/join ...

any maybe others. Those aren't used very often, though.

Actually, I see it at the end. Example:

I totally love what you did there.

/sarcasm

At the beginning, I'd definitely agree with you.

But then, you can't tell whether the sarcasm was intended from the very beginning of the message or merely the last sentence/paragraph.

I prefer this method in irc </sarcasm>

still surprisingly accurate, despite being a decade or so out-of-date.