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Comment by ghc | Hacker News Reader

To reduce your argument to its essence, you're saying typesetting is part of the craft of writing. I've yet to meet an author who believes this (other than enjoying editing their own work as output from a typewriter), and I think the same broadly applies to code. It's not that everyone thinks these things are unimportant, it's that caring deeply about doing them a particular way is orthogonal to the craft. It's something that has long been lampooned (tabs vs. spaces, braces, etc.) as weird behavior.

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More than one writer refuses to use a computer, preferring typewriters. Harlan Ellison learned how to repair typewriters after he could no longer find anyone to fix his. Stephen King wrote Dreamcatcher with a fountain pen.

Authors totally obsess over details that seem irrelevant to people outside that craft.

And that’s totally fine! But there is no correlation whatsoever between writing on a typewriter or using a fountain pen (or the physical experience of writing generally) and the quality of the writing. None.

There is nothing to support this in either writing or programming, at all. For every software craftsman out there obsessing over formatting, editor layout, linters, line length, there is an ancient, horrifyingly laid out C codebase that expertly runs and captures the essence of its domain, serves real traffic and makes real money.

Make your editor work how you like, but if my team lead started to get annoyed after my 4th formatting-only PR I should probably start to think about what I want them to bring up to my manager in my performance review.

> But there is no correlation whatsoever between writing on a typewriter or using a fountain pen (or the physical experience of writing generally) and the quality of the writing

I heard neal stephenson say that he writes using a pen rather than a wordprocessor specifically because it does affect the quality of the writing. Because he handwrites slower than he types, he does more thinking and editing in his head rather than after it's on paper.

And if that works for him then he should do that, and I have no problem with that at all. I just don't think there is anything one can say about writing tools that _generalizes_ to writing quality, and the same applies to the type of conversations programmers often engage in like "functions need to be short!" or "line length MUST be less than 90 or else I will reject this PR!" or "dark mode is objectively better to write code in" etc.

I have no problem whatsoever with people having preferences, I just think people mistake preferences for proof.

I don't disagree with the broader point I just think authors aren't a good example for a non-tool obsessed group of people.

I read https://prog21.dadgum.com/ somewhat regularly when I think I am getting to tool obsessed.

> There is nothing to support this in either writing or programming, at all.

There is no way this is true. There;s 100% chance that no human is productive is uglified JS code.

Those are tools you use to write, not typesetting. It's equivalent to wanting to code on paper or use a specific editor. Cognitive connection to tools is a real thing, and I know a number of authors who really can't form a mental connection with their writing if not using their tool of choice.

That doesn't mean it's normal for them only use a certain typewriter because of its typeface, insist a publisher use Garamond to typeset their book for publication, or refuse to write without a certain margin.

To bring it closer to programming, in collaborative writing especially (think manual writing at large corporations), nobody is insisting that everyone indents paragraphs their way because it's better. As long as there's consistency those matters are best left to the printer. When I was younger I knew a lot of technical writers who in fact really disliked the move to Word from traditional word processors, because they didn't want to be distracted by those things.

There is a class of people who refuse to see computer programming as an art.

They try to shoehorn it into being an engineering discipline and comparing it to authoring a book (something you can't give timelines on or T-Shirt size) probably horrifies them.

Ah, the joys of overloading. Do you mean "art" as the high-brow stuff we see in galleries and are produced in volumes of dozens per artist-years? Or do you mean "art" as the more common stuff that's produced by artisans are the rate of dozens per week? Because to me it's more the latter -- I'm an artisan, not an artist.

Why not both?

Personally, I modified a Hollerith reader to accept Jacquard tapes that I cut by hand with a scalpel.

I’m so much more productive now.

The prose writing metaphor also falls apart the moment one admits that prose doesn't have the need (and is actually very terrible at) working collaboratively, concurrently but not perfectly synchronized and continuously on the same body of text, ensuring at the same time that combined changes don't add up to unwanted/wrong semantics, even in the long term. Are consistent indentations, variable names etc. strictly required for that? No, not logically, but the real world in which our software must be built is resource constrained, so every minute I spend parsing weird formatting inconsistencies is one minute less I can focus on the actual problem that needs solving. Just use a formatter/linter everyone. And I promise I don't care how it's configured, as long as it's consistent across the codebase

Plenty of writers work collaboratively, fyi. Even fiction authors like my mother routinely deal with multiple drafts and edits from multiple editors who review and suggest changes, from peer authors to professional editors contracted by the publishing house. And non-fiction authors routinely collaborate, too. I personally know some consequential non-fiction books where another author ghost wrote troublesome sections, not taking credit except in private.

And this ignores the collaborative writing many authors do to pay the bills: technical writing at large corporations, like bank manuals and such, or academic writing at universities. While consistency and standards are enforced, nobody's arguing that everyone else should really indent paragraphs their way, because that's the best way.

Type setting is not a good analogy here.

A better one would probably be accounting and spread sheets. Having common formatting conventions between spreadsheets (and code files) allows your brain to filter out the noise better. Obviously you can get too down in the weeds on "what are the best conventions" but the most important part is to have them and stick to them.

I think there are accessibility aspects to formatting. Specifically to different formatting.

Not sure the typesetting analogy is the best, but typesetting absolutely matters for readability. Authors don’t need to care about it because typesetting is easy to change (before printing) and because publishers spend time caring about it —- all before it ends up in the hands of readers.

The purpose of writing is to produce something to be read, and typesetting is an important part of making a document readable.

It is incredibly irritating if I need to reformat code to be able to read it clearly before modifying it, then have to either back out all of the formatting changes to create a clean PR that shows the actual change, or create a PR full of formatting changes with the actual logic change buried somewhere within.

If typesetting and a grammar mistake in one sentence were what made a book viable or not, authors would care. I've seen enough (crazy expensive) bugs that could have been caught by linters and bugs introduced through insane formatting and style choices that I can't agree that a book and software are all that comparable.

I'm on team "agree at the beginning and then make it part of CI" and I basically never have to have this conversation more than once or twice per project now but I also think that the people most obsessed with it and dwell on it for their personal daily work are problematic, as are the people who hate any rules whatsoever and want to write complete shit code to just call the job done because "that's the important part".

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