
Writing code and prose - suchire
http://www.ericsuh.com/blog/posts/2016/01/writing-code.html
======
amelius
I have found that writing code is much easier than reading it. Interestingly,
reading prose is much easier than writing it.

Therefore, I wish there was some tool that allowed me to write prose in a more
formal (code-like, hence "boring") style, and have it translated to more vivid
prose. For example, if I use the same word ten times in the same paragraph,
this tool would replace it by synonyms; or if I make sentences which are too
long, it would automatically break them up, or vice versa. Basically, I want
to code the meaning of what I want to say, and have the tool generate the
prose.

~~~
mironathetin
"For example, if I use the same word ten times in the same paragraph, this
tool would replace it by synonyms;"

Very funny. This would make terrible prose, I guess. It is part of the art to
say things only once and thus make repetitions unnecessary.

~~~
Jtsummers
Repetition is useful for memory. If your aim is conversational, like this,
it's unnecessary. But if you're telling a story, it's useful. Besides, the GP
wants to reduce the literal repetition by replacing the identical words with
synonyms. This is akin to writing in Inform 7 or similar interactive fiction
systems. Or if, like me, you're terrible at coming up with character names,
you can use <PROTAGONIST>, <ANTAGONIST>, etc. throughout while you're making
outlines and such. GP would want to do something like that, with proper
substitution of the name with other identifiers later on (full, partial,
first, last, pronoun, nickname).

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mbrock
I don't disagree, but I love contrarian opinions, and I'm reminded of a video
I saw from a talk at an old RubyConf (I think). The talk was about beauty and
aesthetics in code. It described some principles of beauty—simplicity,
elegance, clarity, etc—and explained how these qualities also describe good
code. But I loved that someone from the audience after the talk asked the
question, what about more postmodern notions of beauty? Is there anything
missing in this classical picture?

It's just an interesting question. One way to start thinking about it is to
consider the role of the author in both coding and postmodern texts: we can't
really point to a clear notion of an author anymore. Who's the author of any
given file in the Linux repository? There might be dozens of people involved.
Maybe they together give rise to some emergent super-author, shaped by the
code itself and its culture... Maybe different styles intersect and collide
and create some kind of fruitful chaos. And so on.

So one hypothesis is that classical beauty in code might lead to problems in
cooperation. Like, this code is so perfect that I don't want to touch it. Or
the literate elegance of this module intimidates me as a non-native speaker.
Lots of interesting issues.

~~~
fsloth
Focusing on just how the code looks is like concentrating on the paint job of
a car and ignoring everything else. The deeper, more important concept, is
that is the theory of the program understood and communicated lucidly through
the code.

I'm once more evoking Peter Naur's "Programming as theory building"

[http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf](http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~remzi/Naur.pdf)

"Maybe different styles intersect and collide and create some kind of fruitful
chaos. And so on."

No, coding is not an art where noise synthesis produces reasonable results.

------
ranko
See also [https://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/if-
hemingw...](https://javascriptweblog.wordpress.com/2015/01/05/if-hemingway-
wrote-javascript-explained/)

