Spell checker? Really? Really. When I look at the code, pages, error messages etc. full of spelling mistakes, my first assumption is that people behind this piece of software just don’t care about their customers and/or code. You can’t tell me you are passionate about your product, when you don’t care enough to make it readable to others. Would you hand out an essay filled with spelling mistakes in high school? I thought so. So why on earth would you tolerate poor spelling and syntax in your code?

Good news everyone…

Any half-decent IDE has a spell checker extension. Visual studio has one. Eclipse has one. Even Vi has a spell checker. All you have to do is install and configure the extension. As always there are IDEs out there that don’t support spell checking and if you are unfortunate enough to use one of those IDEs, try spell checking using an office tool. Sure, it is a tad more annoying, but it will save you problems refactoring later on.

But, there is also bad news

Not for you, major language speaking population. For the rest of us, there could be some problems, if spell checker does not support our language. With some luck, your spell checker is based on open source office applications dictionaries and that increases chances you will find the dictionary for your language.

Why go through all that trouble?

Well, as mentioned, it is unprofessional to submit poorly spelled product. Code is difficult to read as is. Adding spelling mistakes to that will only make it worse. But at least that is kept internally. If you don’t check your UI, it might as well happen you are presenting poorly spelled product to your paying customers. Customers are funny. They are willing to oversee some issues, if your product works. However, spelling mistakes hint that your product is not finished and customers don’t like to pay full price for unfinished products. So now, you are spending your time fixing spelling mistakes instead of implementing new features, thus giving your competition opportunity to get ahead.