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Comment by ryanklee | Hacker News Reader

I'm a writer and I think "like that". I know many other writers that do, as well.

And it's not surprising, because writing itself is a technology in a traditional sense. Further, it's more "tech" oriented (in the more contemporary sense) than you give it credit for.

It's very close to coding: It's structural, admits of procedure, copy reuse, partakes of historical design advancements, adapts to tech around it, etc. Fuzzier, maybe. But try and do it well, sometime. The edges are harder than you might think.

(And, as an exasperated aside: Ugh!! There is no wall between creative types and tech types! No such types exist in the first place. Only weird, sticky prejudices.)

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You have a point, but so does he. How many nonsensical comments have you seen online that are obviously the result of failing to proofread from start to finish after editing? You move a sentence from here to there, or rewrite or remove one, and the flow is broken, and it no longer makes sense. Writing and reading are--at least, within a single piece--linear activities. Creating a system for removing or rearranging sentences or paragraphs creates an exponentially increasing number of potential combinations, each of which would need to be proofread completely by a human or an advanced AI. Otherwise you'd end up with nonsensical articles and dumbfounded readers, and then the whole system would be thrown out.

I think you're definitely an exception. I work with large editorial staffs every single day and haven't come across a single person who I think would feel comfortable crafting a "dynamic" story that is susceptible to losing and gaining chunks of copy depending on how much space there is. It would be a total sea change for how most editorial shops operate. They are so detail oriented, and to them, every word counts and has a distinct purpose within the greater text. Basically, if it could be cut, it would have already been cut (either by the author or by a managing editor).

To have a whole section arbitrarily cut from the version of an article that user X reads on their iPad vs user Y on a big screen laptop would be met with skepticism at best, outright horror at worst.

I am a writer as well and I can't imagine writing like that or how such a system could possibly work from a technical perspective, much less a UI perspective.

PS. I didn't mean to say that creative people can't be technical or vice-versa, just that writing tends to be a creative-oriented job while programming is obviously a technical-oriented job. Obviously there is overlap between the two and many people excel at both. Sorry if it came out sounding like I believe there is a creative|technical binary.

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