points by JBits 4 days ago | 0 comments
My thoughts are without a doubt closer to code than writing.
Thoughts are more often than not non-linear, so putting them into writing is challenging.
Meanwhile, when I think of code—and also when I physically write code—it's always possible to leave holes and stubs to be filled in later.
[–] eszed 3 days ago
[–] lilbigdoot 4 days ago
Good point. Writing has to create a narrative in a way code does not. It's generally very structured when written for others and not just ourselves, and I would say you can probably be looser with writing than code in the small but once you get into paragraphs, code starts being more flexible (I don't mean theoretically just my own opinion on what's common). Ie codes syntax is fixed but the composition is very flexible while writing prose is very flexible but you will find only so many ways of writing paragraphs or pages because we are so often using writing to create a narrative arc.
I, at least, have always written in that way - essays, teaching materials, letters, long-form narratives, (and now, recently) specs for the AI-gods, doesn't matter - I get the bits I'm sure of down first, and then tinker (cut-and-paste, do more research, add or remove material, write bridging sections) until I'm able to connect them together.
The most frustrating English teacher I had in high school required us to turn in an outline a week before the essay was due. I did it for the first assignment, and was marked a B, with a comment along the lines of "this was very good, but it deviated from your outline". Which, well, of course it did, because I bloody learned something while I was writing it! The next time, I wrote the whole essay ahead of the "outline" due date, which led me to discover WordPerfect 5.1's "Generate Outline" function, which led her to the mistaken impression that she'd taught me something besides disrespect for authority.
That's not quite a digression by way of personal anecdote, because I wonder if you were taught writing by someone like her? Prose doesn't have to be composed (in both senses of the word) like that. In process, it can be just as shaggy and stubbed and non-linerally referential as code. Furthermore, AIs (I am finding), work quite well with a process like that: I'm constantly telling it to "put X into Deferred", when I haven't yet got something worked out in my head.