Comment by asa400 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by asa400 | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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