
On Authorship and Style (1860) - molteanu
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/s/schopenhauer/arthur/essays/chapter1.html
======
mindB
I like this essay a lot. But the hn title is incorrect. Article title is "On
Authorship and Style" (1860). OP, if you want to discuss this as it applies to
programming, it would be much better to leave a comment to that effect than to
mislead with the title.

~~~
dang
Submitted title was "Difference between ordinary and top programmers according
to Schopenhauer". That of course broke the site guidelines, but the submitter
has since corrected the problem. Let's get on topic now!

~~~
molteanu
The discussion seems to have dried up. Change the packaging and you change the
quality of the product, it seems. At least the perceived one.

I was afraid that this might happen. It happened in the past. So I thought
about a good title that would summarize why I though this essay is relevant
for this community and I was hoping for some discussion and impressions about
it. It did generate some controversy but for the wrong reasons (i.e. the
title). At least it was read and taken into consideration. I still think this
is a very nice write-up from ~200 years ago about what it means to create
something from basically nothing (from pure thought, that is), which
programming is clearly a sub-field of.

Searching through HN, I'm seeing this exact link posted a week ago, with zero
comments and upvotes. It gathered 10 comments and 20 votes in half an hour
with the modified title, none with its original title.

Thank you for your quick response and for unflagging this post.

~~~
gumby
I am in favor of people using titles that reflect what they think will be of
interest to HN readers. I know the line between that and editorializing is not
always clear, but that's a fact of life.

Often an interesting article will have a misleading title for SEO reasons.
Seems like those are appropriately rewritten for HN submission.

Or imagine (I'm making this up) an article in the NYT entitled "Senator
presses tech firms to supply encryption keys". Yawn...I've seen that for
literally decades. But it turns out that the senator drew their analysis upon
specifically bad info by relying on an article in wired or maybe a non-law
enforcement-specific lobbying group, but one that turns out to have been
funded by google. Then a title that called out the specific reason its
relevant to HN would be useful.

(This is a totally made up example; I don't mean to diss wired nor google in
this post).

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brosinante
That's about authors, and using that metric, most of what we code is "half-
true, perverse, forced, and vacillating".

I don't disagree, I just think it's a stretch to apply it to code - and not
the good kind of stretch, more like the kind of stretch where you really want
the german philosopher to have written about you so you'll go through all sort
of lexical excercises to make it happen.

------
CrazyStat
This hits hard based on my experience in academia.

In graduate school I was strongly advised to set aside "big" problems and
focus on safe low-hanging fruit--derivative projects or incremental
improvements to existing work--that will result in a steady stream of
(mediocre) publications. The situation is the same for postdocs and even
tenure track faculty at research-focused institutions. Only after you get ~15
years into your research career (and receive tenure) are you really free to
focus on original work, which tends to be high risk and high reward.

(Of course you _can_ do that earlier, but there's a high chance your career
won't advance on schedule, which is very bad.)

------
yowlingcat
It's a huge stretch to retitle "On Authorship and Style" to "Difference
between ordinary and top programmers according to Schopenhauer"

------
molteanu
I would argue that writing code is equivalent to writing, in general. As in
prose, you're exploring a subject known to you. You've though about the
problem at hand, you've come up with a solution after a lot of going back and
forth, you're now trying to impart this knowledge to other humans. As such,
you have to be clear about what you're saying, going straight to the solution
and not _go round the thought and cover it up_. That is, if you actually do
have something interesting to say about it, and you're not thinking about
gaining likes or money or fame from it.

I've seen some projects lately with many people involved and months or years
of development time invested in them, that I, an average programmer at best,
was able to solve with a few days work and with at least an order of magnitude
less paper used.

 _[..]they put what they have to say into forced and involved language, create
new words and prolix periods which go round the thought and cover it up.
Moreover, they write down words, nay, whole periods, which mean nothing in
themselves, in the hope, however, that some one else will understand something
from them._

I've seen comments and READMEs, for example, that have the exact same attitude
to them, that is, they are written in the hope that someone else will
understand them but the writer actually didn't, he doesn't understand why the
project might be useful to someone else. I've seen big frameworks used, tests
conceived, build methods and CI implemented but where the actual substance of
the project was missing. Dozens of git branches and complex merging good-
practices for projects with at most a few thousand lines of code and 2 or 3
developers only because someone else might look at it and see what a good job
we've done. These projects usually don't solve much, but they sure talk a lot
about how nice it is and how it will solve lots of problems for its users.

 _Nothing else is at the bottom of all such endeavours but the inexhaustible
attempt which is always venturing on new paths, to sell words for thoughts,
and by means of new expressions, or expressions used in a new sense, turns of
phrases and combinations of all kinds, to produce the appearance of intellect
in order to compensate for the want of it which is so painfully felt._

As years go by, I really feel that one, if not the most important skill in
this field, is knowing how to write, how to cleanly and clearly express your
thoughts that you yourself have about the problem and your ideas about the
solution.

~~~
mindB
> I've seen some projects lately with many people involved and months or years
> of development time invested in them, that I, an average programmer at best,
> was able to solve with a few days work and with at least an order of
> magnitude less paper used.

Are any of said software projects open source or otherwise well known? I've
often gotten the same feeling but haven't gone so far as to reimplement and
prove out my intuition.

------
dredmorbius
My first take on opening the link is "Wow! What an amazingly readable page."

(This on a mobile tablet.)

If but that more of the Web were like this.

~~~
dredmorbius
The essay itself is also, of course, excellent. I've not previously read
Schopenhauer, my error.

------
archi42
For those interested in the German original, this is "Über Schriftstellerei
und Stil". It can be found at
[http://aboq.org/schopenhauer/parerga2/stil.htm](http://aboq.org/schopenhauer/parerga2/stil.htm)
(not as beautifully rendered, though).

------
tenkabuto
_big, brimming smile_ This essay reminds me of Emerson's essay "Character" and
lecture "The American Scholar."

------
zoom6628
The article describes Management books, startup guides, and self help books to
a tee! Wonderful read and should be read by all students.

------
agounaris
I think that programming is a bit more complex. You see I get the difference
between the "coder" and the person who cares about adding value and creating
something that others will use. The industry needs both "good coders" and
"creating thinkers" to move forward and its hard, ofc, to find someone who is
able to use all of those parts of the brain. Probably there is a 3rd category
of people who are here just for the $ :)

------
00deadbeef
The linked article is not about programmers or programming

------
AllegedAlec
> Everyone who does things I don't like is bad

~~~
dang
" _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A
good critical comment teaches us something._"

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

