

A Version 1.0 - marvin
http://www.paulgraham.com/laundry.html

======
mdemare
Probably the revised version is "better", but I enjoyed reading the deleted
parts. By condensing an essay you can make it more syropy and thus increase
the number of people who will consider it worth reading. But I think it's
doubtful whether you're doing a service for the readers who would have liked
the original version.

The same phenomenon is being played out with music and bootlegs, and movies
and director's cuts. Most people want the short version, the fans want as much
as they can get.

~~~
gnaritas
Nah, it's the lack of all that unsupported unnecessary fluff that makes Paul's
writing enjoyable. This is a critical step in good writing, stop trying boring
your reader to death and get to the damn point already, and Paul does it well,
Steve Yeggi on the other hand must have missed this lesson. If you had to read
all that stuff everytime, you may not come to enjoy Paul's writing as much as
you do now in the first place. Fans only want more _after_ they've become
fans.

~~~
mdemare
Speak for yourself. Yegge was never terse, yet he may count me a fan.

~~~
gnaritas
I didn't say he didn't have fans, some people like all that verbal diarrhea!

~~~
wanorris
Steve Yegge generally makes unfiltered work for him.

PG treats his essays like oil paintings, and keeps working on them over time
until he's satisfied with the results. Yegge's "drunken blog rants" are more
like sketches -- when they work, the spontaneity is part of the appeal, but
they tend to be much more uneven. Neither style is necessarily better than the
other, just very different.

------
mdemare
I'm now wondering whether it's worth spending a day a week writing, instead of
coding. It's true that you can generate much more ideas by writing, and it
allows you to cast your gaze a lot further than whatever particular method
you're working on. Any thoughts?

~~~
JesseAldridge
I think writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself. pg can
afford to write because he's made his fortune.

Simple notes to yourself should be sufficient for generating and refining
ideas.

~~~
danohuiginn
"writing is more about teaching others than helping yourself."

I disagree. I write a lot of stuff that nobody else sees, just to clarify my
thinking. My head's full of vague ideas, and it's only when I write them down
that I can pick apart the contradictions. It's no different from coding: once
you actually start writing code (rather than just planning it) you suddenly
notice a host of edge cases and potential bugs.

~~~
rantfoil
It's true, writing is a great way to capture thought. The brain just can't
hold enough things at one time to fully understand many problem spaces, but a
Word doc can be infinitely long.

~~~
philh
That's not it. The brain can hold far more than any hard drive. And you don't
really understand something that's not in your brain: all the neural links
just don't exist on paper.

It's the writing that helps. I'm not entirely sure how, but something about
putting thoughts into sentences makes the thoughts themselves more coherent.
Maybe because it forces you to think them in new ways => more connections =>
better understanding.

~~~
phaedrus
Not quite. Long term memory does hold much more than a hard drive. But what
the GP is talking about is the limited capacity of short-term memory. When you
are thinking about something and fill up your short-term memory, things start
dropping out and by definition you can't notice that fact, because all your
short-term memory is full! The benefit of an essay is that you can fix the
ideas down on paper and move on in your thinking, without having to worry
about forgetting where you started from.

~~~
philh
Granted: if you want to capture a specific train of thought, you'll probably
have to write it down.

But I was more referring to "to fully understand many problem spaces", for
which STM isn't really relevant. Understanding is a matter of how a topic is
stored in LTM. Writing it down will improve your understanding of it, but it
won't directly increase the amount you can understand.

------
Alex3917
There seem to be some clear patterns in what was cut: anything angsty,
opinions lacking empirical support, personal feelings, etc. Which isn't to say
that all of these weren't needed to get the thoughts down on paper.

------
ubudesign
I think language is also a factor. English grammar is dependent on word order.
a thought is more free. so transforming that into sentences that reflect the
thought order is a challenge. maybe this is only true for people like me who
speak a different language (Farsi) which has free word order. I can write a
long sentence putting all my thoughts in it without much problem. but when I
write it in English it turns into run-on sentence. The only solution I've
found is short senses that follow my thoughts. While English is a simple
language it's an art to be able to write well so maybe that's why Paul's well
written work include revisions in the process. I'm sure there are more to this
but I'm not a language expert :)

~~~
aflag
I'm not sure that's really true. You tend to think more or less in the terms
of the language you speak most of the time. For example, I lived in the US for
one year and, when I got back to Brazil I'd often think like "I like this
better", wheras in portuguese you'd say something like "I like more of this".
My point being that we adapt to think how we speak and write, so that's not
really the issue when writing down your thoughts.

I think the hardest thing is to be coherent, when you think you often skip
steps that you look with greater care when you write. It's not uncommon that
some of the steps you're skiping are crucial ones.

------
m0nty
"I probably write three to four words for every one that appears in the final
version of an essay."

Writing is cutting. Most things are: a lot of crap is produced for everything
worth keeping.

"Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine
writing, obey it - whole-heartedly - and delete it before sending your
manuscript to press. Murder your darlings." (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch.)

~~~
canoebuilder
Ira Glass on a similar theme

<http://youtube.com/watch?v=3qmtwa1yZRM>

~~~
keizo
A person named canoebuilder on hacker news? I thought I was the only one.

~~~
canoebuilder
It's mostly a metaphor for early peoples who used the empty space they created
in cut down trees for more efficient means of progress.

The literal sense does interest me as well, though. Where do you pilot your
canoes?

~~~
keizo
Haha, yeah... I literally am building canoes. see our website
<http://kamanucomposites.com>

------
mdemare
I liked the comparison of studying the classics in the middle ages to "Alien
Studies". Very revealing metaphor!

~~~
yters
pg makes a point of devaluing the classics in his essays. I don't know why.

Let's assume there are consistent patterns to how people work, and these
patterns are consistent because people forget about them. So, the best way to
learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and history.

Now let's come back to the present day. People give this idea lip service, but
no one really takes the classics seriously anymore. Because of metanarratives
like evolution, we think progress happens automatically and that there is no
intrinsic human nature. We don't realize this worldview is very recent and
people thought it was a bad idea in the past.

Consequently, our worldview becomes a local optimum that limits us from
looking for anything else. This is called hubris in classical literature.
Think Oedipus.

~~~
yters
"the best way to learn about the patterns are by reading the classics and
history"

"ways"

I hate it when I put time into creating a good response and a grammar mistake
makes my writing look retarded.

