Michael Lopp, Please Learn to Write
Writing appears more forgiving because there is no compiler or interpreter catching your its/it’s issues or reminding you of the rules regarding that or which. Here’s the rub: there is a compiler and it’s fucking brutal. It’s your readers. Your readers are far more critical than the Python interpreter. Not only do they care about syntax, but they also want to learn something, and, perhaps, be entertained while all this learning is going down. Success means they keep coming back — failure is a lonely silence.
Learning to write is a far broader and more essential skill for the world than learning to code. Coding can be left to the specialists, writing is needed by everyone.
On writing and coding http://t.co/yvX9dIRP via @Cleartrip
On writing and coding http://t.co/Uc46u52n via @Cleartrip
On writing and coding http://t.co/AdZHto0S via @Cleartrip
On writing and coding http://t.co/da58XTeu via @Cleartrip
On writing and coding http://t.co/iG7qEjMC via @Cleartrip
‘Brutal’ feedback is true of all interaction, not just writing. Here’s the counter-rub: the compiler/interpreter (syntax checking is just a fail-early tool, like the red squigglies in this text-box) is not what one codes for, but the run-time semantics. Software systems’ success is not measured by the absence of compiler errors, but by their sustained ability to solve a ‘problem’. The purpose of writing is also to address a problem, a question.
Without structured and structuring thought nothing non-trivial can be created. Just as it is hard to predict a reader’s response to prose, it is increasingly hard to predict a decently complex computing system’s response to code, let alone the response of the users of the system. So no dearth of challenges.
Coding shouldn’t be left to ‘specialists’. Everyone should learn to code, to whatever capacity they can. There will always be specialists within any art form, working on specific ‘genres’. Yet just because I am not Hemingway, that I needn’t write doesn’t follow. I’m not Satish Gujral, but I should paint. Of course I am not Knuth, but for fuck’s sake, I code.
The cross-genre argument for the utility of coding for everyone is this: because I (try to) write (good) code, I must have a strong hold on basic symbolic logic, which gives me the law of contraposition, which kept the preceding paragraph succinct.