Writing First, Tooling Second • Hacker News Board

Re: Writing First, Tooling Second

#11

Post by macintux » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:31 PM UTC

svat wrote: post #10

macintux wrote: post #9

Where would we be had Knuth taken that approach?

Funny, but note that Knuth had already published three volumes of TAOCP and a second edition of Volume 1 (1968–1973), won a Turing Award for them (1974), and had the second edition of Volume 2 in galley proofs, and even then it was only a combination of two factors (the publishers moving away from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting with a decline in quality, and the emergence of digital typesetting that he fel…

Thanks for adding some sober reality.

And now for perhaps my favorite web page on the Internet: https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/

Re: Writing First, Tooling Second

#12

Post by macintux » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 6:55 PM UTC

blenderob wrote: post #7

MonkeyClub wrote: post #6

In the past 12 days, this has been posted 3 times: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Fsusam.net%2Fwriting-... It's a nice piece, but come on, ease off a bit.

> It's a nice piece, but come on, ease off a bit. I didn't repost it today. I think HN mods did that. If you see your search link, I posted only once 4 days ago. I think HN mods repost some posts. Also check the FAQ - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html > Are reposts ok? If a story has not had significant attention in the last year or so, a small number of reposts is ok. Otherwise we bury reposts as duplicates.

HN has a second chance queue for posts that the moderators feel deserve more attention than they received the first time around.

Re: Writing First, Tooling Second

#13

Post by svat » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 8:42 PM UTC

macintux wrote: post #11

svat wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Funny, but note that Knuth had already published three volumes of TAOCP and a second edition of Volume 1 (1968–1973), won a Turing Award for them (1974), and had the second edition of Volume 2 in galley proofs, and even then it was only a combination of two factors (the publishers moving away from hot-metal typesetting to phototypesetting with a decline in quality, and the emergence of digital typesetting that he fel…

Thanks for adding some sober reality. And now for perhaps my favorite web page on the Internet: https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/

Yes I like that page too, and I guess I was responding to it from memory, more than to your comment :) There's an element of truth to it but also a misunderstanding, so the story can be told in both ways. Maybe I should write this up as a webpage/blog post.

Re: Writing First, Tooling Second

#14

Post by macintux » Fri, Jan 23, 2026, 9:36 PM UTC

svat wrote: post #13

macintux wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for adding some sober reality. And now for perhaps my favorite web page on the Internet: https://yakshav.es/the-patron-saint-of-yakshaves/

Yes I like that page too, and I guess I was responding to it from memory, more than to your comment :) There's an element of truth to it but also a misunderstanding, so the story can be told in both ways. Maybe I should write this up as a webpage/blog post.

Yes, please!

Re: Writing First, Tooling Second

#15

Post by amadeuspagel » Sat, Jan 24, 2026, 4:34 AM UTC

> If you truly dislike writing HTML, that is fine too. Write in Markdown, AsciiDoc or whatever plain text format you find pleasant and convert it to HTML using Pandoc or a similar tool.

I don't just dislike HTML, I dislike plaintext.