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Comment by xmprt | Hacker News Reader

As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming. A good writer can ask the right questions and present them in a way that their target audience can understand. That's the whole point of specialization - programmers should program and journalists should journal. Completing a science degree would be extremely time consuming and wasteful if your goal is to help with science communication.

I think the problem with a lot of technical journalism right now isn't because journalists are lazy or not smart enough to do the research or understand the science. It's because of the insane publishing requirements put on them which leads to subpar quality. Encouraging they get an extra degree won't help fix that.

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Hard disagree. The skillsets for writing and programming are largely orthogonal. The fact you're a programmer who finds writing difficult means nothing in regard to the relative difficulty of each skill.

On the contrary, I have always found writing well (Based on what other people have told me) relatively easy without putting in much focused effort. Whereas programming was something I had to put many hours into.

You got more practice writing human languages. You probably started learned to read/write ~4-6 years old and continued learning for more than 10 years. You probably studied in school that took up a significant portion of your time.

Imagine if you spent that time writing code. Starting at that early age. It would feel easy too.

Even a professional software engineer probably reads and writes more in human language than in code. Reading/writing emails, chatting with colleagues on Slack, or reading comments on HN...

That isn't what I mean. Many, many people have very poor writing despite having done it for many years and having studied it in school. My writing has always been good relative to my peers, and I haven't particularly tried to improve it.

> Hard disagree. The skillsets for writing and programming are largely orthogonal. The fact you're a programmer who finds writing difficult means nothing in regard to the relative difficulty of each skill.

How do you survive code reviews with poor writing?

I insist on well-documented code because conveying intent and purpose of code is extremely important.

That often requires decent writing skills.

sounds uninformed. i'm sure this opinion will change with experience.

> As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming.

For you. Others will find the reverse. Specifically those that have been trained in writing and only dabble in programming. Don't assume everybody thinks and feels the same.

Anyway, I think the world would be far better off with less well-written nonsense. Even if it's replaced with badly written good stuff. Or even if it's not replaced at all.

Yes less of everything please. I’ll continue doing my part by doing as little as possible.

I agree. A science writer should be able to understand the topics they write about well enough to extract the essence.

Way too many science writers just spread misinformation and confusion. This is worse than useless (except perhaps to sell clicks, or perhaps to reinforce partisan dogma), as it contributes to the general public becoming increasingly distrustful of "science".

Writing well is a lot harder than programming, but no more or less harder than programming well.

Well written :)

I agree with both of your points, but I would argue that the blog post is an example of overspecialization. In some roles generalists are better than specialists, and I think technical writing is in this category. Then the question becomes: how to get general knowledge? I think learning on the job is suboptimal for most cases.

And I agree about the resource issues in journalism, but I think this is a secondary issue to the problem of having a fundamental understanding of what you are writing about.

I fully agree: I am a trained journalist and a programmer.

Ten years ago it was possible to feed a family with an editors salary and have a work environment that made for all around decent articles.

But then the public decided they are not going to pay for journalism anymore and that's exactly the reason we are where we are today. Endless SEO-Content-Attacks, a new breaking news headline every 30 minutes and editors that are not "editors" anymore but "content managers" - people who "write articles" for 20 dollars a pop and content creators who have to finance their notebook reviews with affiliate links of said piece of tech - wonder how independent these review are going to be. All the while publishers trying to get ouf of the reds and into the black and trying to appease the almighty Google ad good as possible.

You people brought that onto yourself. Anybody who wants to write for a career today must be able to afford it...

Disagree with blaming the general public. I'm a librarian-programmer who's dabbled in writing and done some political comms work, though never journalism.

You're right about the lack of financial ability for writing to keep one afloat financially (unless you're willing to do sketchy work, of course), but that's more a tragedy of the attention economy commons than the fault of the average news consumer. The business divisions of publications realized they could make as much money without paying their journalists as much; why wouldn't they do that? The answer, of course, is because if every outlet turns into a tabloid that it turns out that's bad for society, but no outlet is going to give up the attention economy/data $$$ in exchange for a healthier society because their competitors are still playing the game and they're not going to disadvantage themselves.

Journalists and publications are also not helping their case with trying to run so leanly (no editors, QA, fact-checking, etc.) that their work is no longer worth paying for for those of us who ARE be willing to pay for decent journalism.

The incentives of both journalists and their bosses no longer match each other, and in addition both sets of incentives also don't match what society requires.

> As a programmer with a CS degree who has also dabbled in writing, I can tell that writing well is a lot harder than programming.

As an award winning writer with a day job in programming writing bad code is easier than writing bad prose. Most people have been exposed to enough good writing to know it when they see it even if they don't appreciate it.

Most programmers have never seen good code. The only person to consistently aim for well written code is Knuth: https://wiki.c2.com/?TexTheProgram

That he needed to invent a whole new ecosystem to do that in should tell you how far away the average programmer is from getting there.

> The only person to consistently aim for well written code is Knuth

That is a ridiculous statement. Are you really saying that from all the developers all over the world you believe that he is the only one who consistently aims for well written code? How would you even start ascertaining the truthfullness of this? Have you went around, interviewed all the developers and found their ”aim for well written code” to be lacking in consistency?

> That he needed to invent a whole new ecosystem to do that in should tell you how far away the average programmer is from getting there.

That he thought he needed to invent a new ecosystem tells you much about him, yes. It absolutely does not tell you about the aims of others. Perhaps others found that they can write well writen code consistently even without inventing a new ecosystem.

>That is a ridiculous statement.

That is a content free statement, you should think better.

>Are you really saying that from all the developers all over the world you believe that he is the only one who consistently aims for well written code?

Pretty much. The only people who write code for people instead of computers are those who use literate programming. There are a few of them around - the largest project being axiom: http://www.axiom-developer.org/ - but they are basically a rounding error.

>How would you even start ascertaining the truthfullness of this? Have you went around, interviewed all the developers and found their ”aim for well written code” to be lacking in consistency?

Every project I've looked at, including those praised for great code quality, were universally terrible. People seem to think that code quality means using consistent variable names and indenting. Which is like thinking that the reason why War and Peace is a good novel was because of Leo Tolstoy's neat handwriting.

>That he thought he needed to invent a new ecosystem tells you much about him, yes. It absolutely does not tell you about the aims of others. Perhaps others found that they can write well writen code consistently even without inventing a new ecosystem.

It tells me that no one else has ever thought about the point of code. It's not to get a computer to do something. It's to explain to people how to do something.

The computer is just a way to do it faster.

> That is a content free statement, you should think better.

It is the thesis statement of my comment. It tells you what I think of your opinion while the rest of them tells you why.

> Every project I've looked at,

Great. So what? That might be enough to show that many projects are terrible. It doesn’t show what those people’s aim was. And certainly not enough to show that nobody other than Knuth consistently aims to write well writen code.

On the contrary it is super simple to prove you wrong. I have multiple excelent colleagues and former colleauges who are obsessed about writing well written, readable code. They work hard to find the right abstractions, document their designs, discuss the macro and micro level consequences of choices they make. They worry about creating missuse resistant APIs, and rewrite code when they deem it not simple and obvious enough. They review fellow developers code to maintain these high standards. These are all forms of consistently aiming to write well written code.

When you say “only Knuth…” you are dissing all of these great engineers. And you are dissing them, without even knowing them.

> People seem to think that code quality means using consistent variable names and indenting.

You clearly haven’t met the right people then.

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