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Comment by zbobet2012 | Hacker News Reader

zbobet2012

Everyone is trashing on this; and for the the most part I agree. However, there is a very large value in an English education for programmers.

Learning to write well is learning to communicate effectively. And communication is a core goal of programming. The audience for our code is not the machine, but another developer, or maybe ourselves.

Consider this passage:

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that he make every word tell.

I open code every day that code benefit from it massively. I suspect you do too.

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>Everyone is trashing on this; and for the the most part I agree. However, there is a very large value in an English education for programmers.

>Learning to write well is learning to communicate effectively. And communication is a core goal of programming. The audience for our code is not the machine, but another developer, or maybe ourselves.

Indeed, and clear writing and communication is something that should be taught in K-12 school. You shouldn't have to go to university just to learn to write clearly.

To the extent that you do want to be learning that kind of skill in university, I'm not convinced that universities are very good at teaching it. I'm certainly not convinced that sitting around reading a whole lot of Virginia Woolf is a very good way of getting better at writing clearly, except in the same rather roundabout sense that waxing a car makes you better at karate.

I'm not sure what a program of study actually aimed towards clarity of writing would look like, but I imagine it would avoid the existing academic fetishisation of fiction over non-fiction. Few of us will ever write much fiction, most of us will have to write a lot of non-fiction, and yet our English classes are focused almost entirely on reading and analysing fiction, like a glorified version of tvtropes.

In my experience classes that read literature like that are not to teach you to write better (at least not the direct goal), but maybe to explore the genre or author and write or analyze her.

In my university the writing classes were your usual "this is the theme/subject for the whole semester, I'll give you prompts for you to research and write about".

> I'm certainly not convinced that sitting around reading a whole lot of Virginia Woolf is a very good way of getting better at writing clearly, except in the same rather roundabout sense that waxing a car makes you better at karate.

Ha ha. Love the analogy :). Totally agree. There aspects of creativity and conciseness required for good developers. Its also true that it takes a while for those aspects to sink into a new developers. Its absolutely true that most people outside of the software community don't recognize this, stereotyping software developers as automaton or genius 'hacker types'. For all these reasons I appreciate the article in the nytimes highlighting the creative aspect of software development. But lets not stretch it to Virginia Woolf, and pointers by philosophers. Come on! For some reason that starts reminding me of the rather faux romanticized and pretentious 'Mozart in the Jungle' depiction of musicians stopping in the street to 'hear the music of the city'. Conversely too, I think writers would take serious affront if we asked them to take programming courses in school to prep for a career in, say, journalism or creative writing.

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