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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

There are many similitudes between writing novels and writing code, but the main difference is that it's much easier to write bad novels than bad code.

Bad code doesn't work.

There can be "beautiful" code that doesn't work, but it's pointless. And there are many instances of ugly, even abominable code, that does work, but... well, at least it works!

It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works". It may work for some people and not others. It may not work today and work in a hundred years, or the opposite.

We can never know. Least of all, the author herself.

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I don't really agree. "Works" is a lower bound for code, but hardly the end all and be all. There's a whole world out there of "bad but works" code.

And about as much arguing about what makes "good code" as there is about what books are good and bad.

> There's a whole world out there of "bad but works" code

That's what I said... But not the same can be said about a novel...

> Bad code doesn't work.

> It's very hard, and maybe impossible, to determine if a novel "works".

I wonder if there is a an assumption here about what it means to "work" vs to be "bad". Psychologically, maybe it's helpful to view each person as their own interpreter, and there is more variation there compared to (e.g.) a specific python interpreter.

But even in python I could write totally not-python code, and have the python interpreter run it (e.g. by writing a codec). And I could write beautiful code that throws an error, and have a person debug it for <some_purpose>, and in meeting that purpose it might be working.

I think the challenge here is that "work" is being defined in a narrow, technical sense for code, but is recognized in a much broader, social/cognitive sense, for novels!

There are no bugs, only unrealized intentions.

There are startups trying to quantify what "works" for novels [1]. Of course they're just scraping the barest surface of what "works" means as of yet with attempts to analyse pacing and use of different word types and how characters are described etc.

I've tested some while writing my own novel, and it was more "interesting" than useful at this point, but I might give it another shot with novel #2 to contrast and compare the two.

It'll be interesting to see how those tools evolve, though.

[1] authors.ai is one example.

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