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Comment by stonemetal12 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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