31–40 of 87 posts
Will it be a single-threaded story with minimal cruft?
> One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one.
What's implied here is the hope for a new experience.
But this can never be achieved: A programmer can never experience the writing of a novel as a non-programmer would.
Furthermore: Even the similarities can only be thought about from a programmers mind.
Imagine two writers discussing writing. One is a non-programmer, the other one is a programmer. Even if, after some exlpaining, the non-programmer and the programmer agree on the similarities, this can only happen because the non-programmer changed. They needed to learn some programming just to understand the similarities experienced by the programmer.
The non-programmer writer will never be a non-programmer-writer again.
The author experiences writing as very similar to programming precisely because they are a programmer.
An underappreciated aspect of programming that is taught well and consistently in the context of writing is the need for iteration. Never publish something without rereading it first. Anything longer than an email, you should have a break between writing a first draft and taking a second look at it. Murder your darlings: learn to recognize things that you're proud of for the wrong reasons, things that other people wo…
Bad code doesn't work.
There can be "beautiful" code that doesn't work, but it's pointless. And there are many instances of ugly, even abominable code, that does work, but... well, at least it works!
It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works". It may work for some people and not others. It may not work today and work in a hundred years, or the opposite.
We can never know. Least of all, the author herself.
Another difference, that I have found, is that programming is immediately rewarding because it's verifiable. On the other hand, writing is without a feedback mechanism or a very delayed feedback or even subjective feedback, which can be painful and demotivating.
But ultimately when you write code it was done for some purpose so a similar delayed / subjective feedback mechanism is still relevant (i.e. does it solve problems for users? Does it work with real data? Does it scale?)
btw, Congratulations.. Looking forward to your sci-fi novel @antirez
Anyway, I love how redis evolved, and its design from the beginning from @antirez. That's why I am eagerly to read his another craft.
While I think there's some truth to this, the author has it backwards in some kind of way. Or rather: The author misses an important epistemologic nuance. > One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. What's implied here is the hope for a new experience. But this can never be achieved: A programmer can never…
Sure. But the veracity of the comparison doesn't depend on the prerequisites to make the comparison.
There are many similitudes between writing novels and writing code, but the main difference is that it's much easier to write bad novels than bad code. Bad code doesn't work. There can be "beautiful" code that doesn't work, but it's pointless. And there are many instances of ugly, even abominable code, that does work, but... well, at least it works! It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works…
> It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works".
I wonder if there is a an assumption here about what it means to "work" vs to be "bad". Psychologically, maybe it's helpful to view each person as their own interpreter, and there is more variation there compared to (e.g.) a specific python interpreter.
But even in python I could write totally not-python code, and have the python interpreter run it (e.g. by writing a codec). And I could write beautiful code that throws an error, and have a person debug it for , and in meeting that purpose it might be working.
I think the challenge here is that "work" is being defined in a narrow, technical sense for code, but is recognized in a much broader, social/cognitive sense, for novels!
But when I'm writing prose, it does not feel anything like writing code. I enjoy a beautiful line of written code, and can sit back and admire it for a while, before I get on with the business of hating it a week or three later, but it is nothing like the experience of feeling the taste of words on the tongue, of reaching into my own garbage sack of mental vomit to pull out gems to glimmer in the sun.
There are many similitudes between writing novels and writing code, but the main difference is that it's much easier to write bad novels than bad code. Bad code doesn't work. There can be "beautiful" code that doesn't work, but it's pointless. And there are many instances of ugly, even abominable code, that does work, but... well, at least it works! It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works…
> Bad code doesn't work. > It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works". I wonder if there is a an assumption here about what it means to "work" vs to be "bad". Psychologically, maybe it's helpful to view each person as their own interpreter, and there is more variation there compared to (e.g.) a specific python interpreter. But even in python I could write totally not-python code, and have t…