How Writing Code Has Made Me a Better Writer, and Why It Matters
“Without requirements or design, programming is the art of adding bugs to an empty text file.” — Louis Srygley
When I first started writing, both code and content, I wrote sloppily (I still do) and without purpose. I’m not one of the finest writers out there, but I have certainly improved (I think so, since I now know what an Oxford comma is).
I have always been intrigued by Linguistics and Computer Science, as well as their intersection (Natural Language Processing), which served as motivation to me while writing this article.
The skills that are required to write good code are quite similar to the ones needed to write efficiently, persuasively or well in general. Programming is essentially a different way of visualising processes and breaking them down into smaller and more manageable chunks, a skill not limited to just writing but also applicable to things such as business.
As Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter, puts it: “I don’t think you do it to become an engineer or a programmer; you do it because it teaches you how to think in a very, very different way. It teaches you about abstraction around breaking problems into small parts and then solving them, around systems and how systems inter-connect. So, these are tools you will use everywhere, especially as you think about building a business, or running a business, or even working in a business. If you can synthesise a massive, complex system into something that is essential and articulate it in an effectively crisp way, that’s exactly what programming teaches you.”
Structure, Rules and Planning
Read the following sentence: “After reading Bahl’s previous articles, this article maintains the streak of brilliance.”
I am sure you smelt something wrong (Ignoring the petty narcissism, of course). Who read Bahl’s previous articles? This article? What?
This is an example of a classic dangling modifier. One of the correct versions to the sentence might be: “After reading Bahl’s previous articles, I believe that this article maintains the streak of brilliance.”
Grammar classes aside, we are able to interpret sentences of these kinds because of, well, common sense. But computers are dumb. Programming them requires explicit instructions for everything, needs careful planning and obviously is bound by certain rules (syntax).
After beginning to program, I realised how much detail-oriented I became. For example, I would not bother much about the hyphen between detail and oriented in the last sentence that your brain just scooted over, but now, I do.
Creative Outlets
Both of the tasks require a splash of ingenuity. Donald Knuth, A computer scientist and professor at Stanford University, says programmers are “essayists who work with traditional aesthetic and literary forms.”
Not long after starting to code did I start seeing this not-so-obvious set of analogies. Both of the tasks essentially involve what Vikram Chandra, author of Geek Sublime, calls “the composition of complexity by building simple objects and putting them together.”
A lot of people argue by saying that the disanalogies between the two outweigh the analogies. I certainly agree that programming is more about developing algorithms and adhering to mathematical logic, but as R.E Warner says, the ultimate motive remains the same: to create a work that changes minds.
Teaching Your Kids to Code
Teaching programming concepts to children has been a hot international topic, and is slowly gaining popularity because of its unprecedented importance.
Whilst interviewing for Code Camp, which is one of Australia’s fastest growing social impact businesses, I was asked “Why do you think children should learn to code?”, to which I replied,” Achieving a basic proficiency in coding is not only paramount to drive change and in developing strong analytical skills but also because the people of tomorrow should be able to understand the back-end facets of technology instead of simply consuming it”. Moreover, in a lot of cases, being able to write code is the sole difference between possessing a wonderful idea in theory and turning that idea into reality.
The Big Picture
In the last decade, we have not only seen economies but entire new worlds being structured upon nothing but digital code. Describing the new digital ecosystem probably requires a new article worth-of-space to talk about, and with exciting new concepts like Machine Learning, the Blockchain and Big Data revolutionising the way we have conventionally looked at it, it is not hard to notice how the world’s being continually changed, one bit at a time.
Mark Zuckerberg quite facetiously said:” The real story is actually probably pretty boring, right? I mean, we just sat at our computers for six years and coded.”
