Raganwald: Zen in the Art of Rewriting | Hacker News Reader

Raganwald: Zen in the Art of Rewriting

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14 pointscharzom7 comments

Can we stop misusing the word "Zen" already? I practice Zazen and I rewrite code... they don't have that much in common!

I thought Zen was something one applied to circumstances, or had a bearing on how one dealt with events or activities.

Question: Do you think Zen has something in common with archery?

I can answer that one as poorly as I write essays: Zen has nothing in common with Archery, however the practice of Archery can be the practice of Zen when approached in a certain way.

Thus, it is perfectly correct to suggest that software development as we practice it has nothing to do with Zen. It could be that someone, somewhere practices software development as Zen, however Chris--in his refreshingly frank and pretense-free manner--is correct if he is surmising that I do not practice software development as one practices Zen. I don't.

And I believe him to be perfectly correct in suggesting that software itself has nothing to do with Zen. If it did (and I do not know if it could), it would be the approach that is related, not the software itself.

I do realise where this flood of bad titles comes from: Eugen Herigel went to Japan and learnt archery from a "Zen Master"... here the author is quoting some wacky Zen story in the prelude to make the story sound better, that's all.

You are exchanging cause and effect: you describe my writing as if I wrote a post about the similarity between rewriting essays and rewriting code, then realized it needed spice and inserted a zen story as a preamble.

What actually happened is that someone made a very disparaging remark about my writing in a previous post. I tried to look for the deep truth in what they were saying and realized that I also thought my writing fell far short of describing how I felt. Around the same time I was reading "Zen Shorts" to my son, and read the story of the robe and the moon again...

I sat down and wrote a post that quoted the story and ended an emotional paragraph afterwards, simply lamenting the fact that my writing is so poor. Yes, the original version of the post was little more than the story.

After an hour or so, the analytical part of my brain took over and I thought of one major reason my writing is not better, the lack of enough rewriting (not that rewriting would make it great, or even good, but certainly it would make it better).

I then added the rest to the post. So, you see, I did not actually add a wacky zen story to make a post about rewriting better. Although, to be fair, the way I arrived at the post does not in any way make it better than if I had proceeded as you suggested.

But, and I doubt you will understand this, the way I arrived at the post has very deep consequences for me.

Did you find any relevance between the story and writing?

Sorry, I don't understand what you're getting at?

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