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Comment by runevault | Hacker News Reader

Prose is very little indication of success, sadly. Some of it is marketing, but some of it is just hitting a moment in time. Look at Fifty Shades of Grey, the prose is terrible, but a lot of women needed what it was offering them on an emotional level and so it sold a TON of copies. And then once a book hits a certain critical mass people will start to pick it up who aren't the target audience just to see what the hell the buzz is about.

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Same could be said for programming regarding prose. You can write beautiful code (modularized, great exception handling, proper form, etc.) that doesn't solve the problem properly or write ugly code (huge monolith, repeated code, meh error handling) that solves a large business problem.

An ugly monolith that solves pain is going to be worth more than a beautiful piece of software that doesn't solve the pain. I'm not saying you can't have both, just that writing beautiful code by itself doesn't help, much like very good prose in novel writing.

Sure, but I'm saying even something that is beautiful and does offer a decent amount of emotional impact still isn't guaranteed success, either from simply not being found or not hitting the right emotion that impacts a wide swath of people. And trying to do that is mostly guesswork, since it is a regularly moving line.

Well okay, but there's a big difference between code and literature, which is that the end user of software doesn't read the code: the code isn't the product, it's what the code does.

It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said, but at least it has to be understandable. You don't have to have a wonderful prose to be a great author, but at least people need to be able to figure out (some of) what you are saying.

>but at least it has to be understandable

And then there is James Joyce :-)

> It could of course be argued that in literature what is said is more important than how it is said

This could be said about most things to be honest. What something says or does is generally more important than how exactly it does, regardless of whether the thing is a book or a piece of tech or anything else in between.

It's one of the reasons so many startups and projects struggle, because they think their work is going to be about solving a programming problem while it's actually about solving a marketing/network/human one. So many people all programming community software to become the next Facebook or Reddit or whatever else. So many losing to some guy setting up a forum script because the latter actually focused on the community and the former were interested in the shiny tech.

Doesn't that, like, happens frequently with women (movie, book, like fashion or something) ? Or do dudes the same thing. Maybe it just felt natural for me being a dude.

> Or do dudes the same thing.

I don't know about you, but I binge read something like fifty Star Trek novels when I was a kid because that's what the library had. That was once I ran out of the other shitty sci-fi on offer, because I'd already read all the Asimov three times over.

I think we think of women as doing this more because men tend to be employed more often than women, and once the kids are old enough to become self-sufficient - and/or shipped off to school - homemakers of both genders get more downtime to sit down and read.

Yeah a non-trivial portion of the Romance market is stay at home moms who have down time while the kids are at school (obviously not all day with cooking/cleaning/etc) and they will read multiple books a week commonly.

And on the guys front, plenty of guys read cheap thrillers that are all about explosions and blood without much prose behind them.

Don’t know about you, but 80% of the people on line at 4 am for an iPhone 5 (last time I did it) were dudes.

Also, Star Wars.

> Or do dudes the same thing.

Motor vehicles (muscle cars, Japanese sport bikes, Tesla, etc.), programming languages (JS, Lisp, Rust), liquor (vodka, whiskey, Moscow mules), electronics (hi-fi audio, pagers, TVs, smartphones), web frameworks (too many to list), beer styles ("imports", stouts, IPAs, Pilsners), grooming (sideburns, beards, mustaches), etc.

As far as I can tell, the main difference between men chasing trends and women doing is that dudes sink way more money into it and take it way more seriously.

And about half of our hobbies have health or injury risks.

Not a female, but growing up I read every Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew and Goosebumps book I could get my hands on.

In my opinion this trait exists for all genders.

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