Guy Steele & Eric Raymond (don’t know which wrote this part):
Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to
the dismay of American editors. Thus, if “Jim is going” is a phrase, and so
are “Bill runs” and “Spock groks”, then hackers generally prefer to write:
“Jim is going”, “Bill runs”, and “Spock groks”. This is incorrect according
to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the
final period inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to
hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don’t belong in
them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of
programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When
communicating command lines or small pieces of code, extra characters can be
a real pain in the neck.
Guy Steele & Eric Raymond (don’t know which wrote this part):
Here or here.
(The first link is to the copy on ESR himself’s site, but the quotes are messed up.)