
The Next Programming Skill You Should Learn - nickb
http://blog.slickedit.com/?p=223
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gruseom
Philip Greenspun in _Founders At Work_ (p. 325):

 _The people who were really good software engineers were usually great
writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and
communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had
trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn't write._

I posted this before (<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127743>), but that
thread was already old, and it's relevant here too.

Edit: I'm not sure I agree with the (slickedit) post, though. Saying "Learn to
write" is more like saying "Learn to think" than "Learn to drive". One can
improve and refine, but by the time a person gets to be a professional
programmer I don't think one is likely to see order-of-magnitude improvement.

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hernan7
Reading good prose helps. Also, rewriting.

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gruseom
But good writers are far more likely to do these things than bad writers are.
Among what Greenspun calls the "average-quality programmers", I can't think of
many who could care less about reading good prose (they read MSDN at best), or
about rewriting anything at all (even their code).

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Hexstream
"Wordpad and Paint are sufficient, and don’t tell me you don’t have those."

I don't have 'dows.

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simplegeek
Absolutely, but I've been seeing a trend here. Two kinds of great hackers
a)-Great writers and they write good stuff e.g. PG. b)-Great hackers but they
don't write a thing e.g. RTM. Yeah, I know he and other such hackers write
plethora of cool academic papers but I always wish if more great hackers like
RTM & others would write stuff for public en-masse. May be, this is just not
possible. Just a mere wish.

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mleonhard
RTM = ?

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dmoney
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Tappan_Morris%2C_Jr>.

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ericb
Good writing and good code are similar:

Elements of Style: Omit Needless Words

Pragmatic Programmer's Guide: Don't Repeat Yourself

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tokipin
speaking of slickedit, it's a very good editor. it has all the source editing
stuff you could want like intellisense and tagging and whatnot, along with
emulation for a bunch of editors like VS, emacs, vim. if i didn't use so many
of the advanced features of the official vim i would use slickedit

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jcl
I absolutely agree... If you can't read your code, it shouldn't have been
written in the first place. Otherwise, there's no way you'll be able to debug
it when something goes wrong six months from now.

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bootload

        Working in a cave
    

He was an introvert in a workspace full of extroverts. Working to short time
lines in a code monkey shop reporting to various non-technical managers.

    
    
        The lifespan of a tech skill
    

The tools are chosen for him.

    
    
        The golden rule of documenting software design
    

The products are designed by committee on paper and changed at regular
intervals. Everyone had a good, _different_ idea of what constituted the final
product.

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noodle
learn to write? i try hard for long time but me still don't does it right.

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mixmax
This is why outsourcing to India is a bad idea.

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kirubakaran
Can you please elaborate?

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mixmax
It was a joke based on the grandparents use of bad English.

:-)

