Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Please learn to write

randsinrepose.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 124 posts

Re: Please learn to write

#81

Post by eropple »

MartinCron wrote: post #46
edw519 wrote: post #23

Source of my problems: design issues 5% architecture constraints 5% language shortcomings 1% mental blocks 5% personal time management 4% personal energy 5% communication with others 75% I waste more time just trying to figure out what others are trying to say, sometimes in person and by voice, but mostly in writing. For most emails, I have to click "reply" or call back simply because what you're trying to tell me is…

Did I just end that sentence with a preposition? A preposition is a perfectly acceptable thing to end a sentence with. Seriously. If you find yourself re-writing it as "with which to end a sentence" you're going to come across as stilted and awkward.

I'm not against ending a sentence with a preposition, but I find myself often unconsciously avoiding doing it in speech as well as in writing. I don't really find it stilted (but I don't care about the issue one way or another). I say "what are you talking about?" about as naturally as I do "On which machine does this process run?".

Re: Please learn to write

#82

Post by adavies42 »

madhadron wrote: post #72
MartinCron wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did I just end that sentence with a preposition? A preposition is a perfectly acceptable thing to end a sentence with. Seriously. If you find yourself re-writing it as "with which to end a sentence" you're going to come across as stilted and awkward.

Eschewing trailing prepositions is a rule improperly inherited from Latin. It does not apply to Germanic tongues where prepositions are necessary to disambiguate verbs. For example, to ask about, to ask of, to ask to, and to ask in are very quite distinct. In Latin, the default position of the verb is the end of the sentence. Latin word order isn't fixed like English, so the ordering of words is a form of emphasis, a…

nicely written.

> You can't similarly transform intransitive verbs because they require a preposition. In German, you would say a for-ask or an of-ask, but we don't accept that in English.

i think i'll have a bit of a lie-down now....

Re: Please learn to write

#83

Post by ehutch79 »

mark-r wrote: post #59
edw519 wrote: post #23

Source of my problems: design issues 5% architecture constraints 5% language shortcomings 1% mental blocks 5% personal time management 4% personal energy 5% communication with others 75% I waste more time just trying to figure out what others are trying to say, sometimes in person and by voice, but mostly in writing. For most emails, I have to click "reply" or call back simply because what you're trying to tell me is…

This is exactly why Jeff Atwood was wrong. If you can solve your own problem instead of having to communicate it to someone else, you've taken away 75% of the impediment to a solution.

no, what atwood was saying is that if you're dealing with a problem todo with FOO, learning about BAR won't help you.

Re: Please learn to write

#84

Post by adavies42 »

bmj wrote: post #27
walexander wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely other fields use their "abilities to make their abilities easier". As a coders we live in abstractions and you should be seeing them everywhere. Writers work with words, but some smart writers invented sentences as tools to help structure them. Some other writers invented paragraphs to structure those sentences. Some even smarter writers invented novels, short stories, screenplays, etc. These are all tools…

It's been almost 15 years since my linguistics courses, but I'm pretty sure the spoken word (along with the grammars that bounded it) existed long before writing. I also believe you drawing correlations between human languages and computer languages that don't exist. Computer language designers define syntax and grammar initially. Human language develops far more organically (to put it another way, where's the spec f…

programming languages are often less "designed" than you might think. consider the history of C: the path leading up to the first formal spec, ANSI C 89, was twenty years long and involved endless mutations and competing versions--commonly called "dialects"! many languages (perl, python, etc.) have only a reference implementation, not a spec per se, and things like HTML (not precisely a programming language, but definitely a computer language) are so flexible and underspecified in practice as to resemble human language quite closely.

Re: Please learn to write

#85

Post by adavies42 »

swombat wrote: post #11
[deleted] wrote: post #7

[deleted]

There is very little automation required in writing, though. Writing is for people, not compilers, and people don't like reading the same thing over and over yourself. Good writers don't repeat themselves simply because it's boring (except, of course, in situations where it makes sense to repeat yourself for some specific purpose, but I digress)... Also, it's not fair to say that there is no leverage effect from writ…

> There is very little automation required in writing, though. > > Writing is for people, not compilers, and people don't like reading the same thing over and over yourself.

isn't romance half the US fiction market or something? romance authors are basically human automatons all executing (not implementing) the same function over and over again.

Re: Please learn to write

#86

Post by adavies42 »

barbazfoo12 wrote: post #67

Maybe the thought of people who do know how to communicate, such as Mayor Bloomberg, learning to code is bothersome to Jeff Atwood. If so, consider why. My concern is that Bloomberg is just looking for money. He may have no interest in how a computer works. If he could code, what sort of programs would he write? For example, with respect to the desktop and the web, many "coders" write programs that are a constant gam…

you know, now that i think about it, the first question really ought to be, why the hell does the man who brought us the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal bloomberg terminal need to "learn to code"? is he just talking about updating his skills, or has he actually been running one of the world's biggest data companies for more than thirty years without knowing how to program?

Re: Please learn to write

#87

Post by regs »

mark-r wrote: post #59
edw519 wrote: post #23

Source of my problems: design issues 5% architecture constraints 5% language shortcomings 1% mental blocks 5% personal time management 4% personal energy 5% communication with others 75% I waste more time just trying to figure out what others are trying to say, sometimes in person and by voice, but mostly in writing. For most emails, I have to click "reply" or call back simply because what you're trying to tell me is…

This is exactly why Jeff Atwood was wrong. If you can solve your own problem instead of having to communicate it to someone else, you've taken away 75% of the impediment to a solution.

If you're working on a problem that you can solve alone, you need a bigger problem.

Re: Please learn to write

#88

Post by mark-r »

jeffpersonified wrote: post #65
mark-r wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why Jeff Atwood was wrong. If you can solve your own problem instead of having to communicate it to someone else, you've taken away 75% of the impediment to a solution.

All dependent on context. In the context of a team, one can rarely solve all problems by herself. More importantly, it can cause greater disfunction when work isn't coordinated/communicated appropriately. The whole point of working in a team is to get more work done more efficiently because the work load is shared and each member focuses on her specific skill, and doesn't do everything.

Yes, context is key. My implied context was small problems that can be solved with just a little bit of programming. If the problem is big enough to require a team then a different approach is required.

Re: Please learn to write

#89

Post by mark-r »

regs wrote: post #87
mark-r wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why Jeff Atwood was wrong. If you can solve your own problem instead of having to communicate it to someone else, you've taken away 75% of the impediment to a solution.

If you're working on a problem that you can solve alone, you need a bigger problem.

People deal with small problems or questions all the time. If you can answer your own question using less effort than it would require you to communicate the question to someone else, you're ahead.

Re: Please learn to write

#90

Post by barbazfoo12 »

adavies42 wrote: post #86
barbazfoo12 wrote: post #67

Maybe the thought of people who do know how to communicate, such as Mayor Bloomberg, learning to code is bothersome to Jeff Atwood. If so, consider why. My concern is that Bloomberg is just looking for money. He may have no interest in how a computer works. If he could code, what sort of programs would he write? For example, with respect to the desktop and the web, many "coders" write programs that are a constant gam…

you know, now that i think about it, the first question really ought to be, why the hell does the man who brought us the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_Terminal bloomberg terminal need to "learn to code"? is he just talking about updating his skills, or has he actually been running one of the world's biggest data companies for more than thirty years without knowing how to program?

It just goes to show that you do not need great knowledge of programming to launch a business that relies on it. The founders of Bloomberg LP all had very good knowledge of the financial sector and the technology used in it. They knew the shortcomings in the solutions provided to trading desks. But whether any of them could themselves construct a Bloomberg Terminal is, in retrospect, irrelevant.

They had industry-specific knowledge of the problem they were attempting to solve. Unless you have worked in an industry, as a programmer you are unlikely to understand the true nature of the problems in that industry. And thus, you will not know what opportunities there might be for innovation. Is this the so-called "non-technical founder"?

Bloomberg wants to know how to build things in software. He wants to stimulate New York's economy with more software development industry reducing reliance on the finacial industry alone. It's interesting if nothing else.

Post reply on HN