jimmysong on Nostr: Writing is a habit. It takes a lot of practice to get good at and as with every ...

Writing is a habit. It takes a lot of practice to get good at and as with every discipline, if you don't use it, you lose it.

It's still a little weird for me to think of myself as a writer. I'm a technical guy. I've been obsessed with computers since I was 8 years old. I've been programming since I was 9. I've been paid for providing programming services for over 20 years.

Yet looking back, it's obvious that writing was a big part of what I was doing. Explaining what needs to be done or how I did something, turned out to have value. I was a math major and writing up proofs is essentially that, it's explaining why something is true in a step-by-step, logical way. This is why so many math and physics people eventually find their place in industry as programmers.

There's also the advent of email, which came at the right time for me. I was in college when the World Wide Web exploded, in 1994. Around that time, the big thing for everyone was email, how you could send letters to people quickly and efficiently. No more waiting for a week or more to receive a reply from someone. I was an email junkie, keeping up with high school friends and writing letters to other people I had kept in touch with. Email for a few years there was a real repository of good letter writing.

Even coding itself was a form of writing. There's beauty in it if you care to look. One of my good friends, Ken Liu is an amazing coder and also an amazing writer. There's something about crafting words that lends itself to a creativity found in coding.

And yes, there is documentation, which unfortunately is very lacking in most programming environments. But the actual code writing really is a form of explaining. It's just to a computer and not to another human being.

In a way, the practice of coding, of being precise about your instructions, carries over to writing. Of course, English isn't nearly as precise as Rust, but we should still be as clear as possible. Perhaps this is why I focus so much on clarity in my writing, rather than in ideas that can be interpreted many different ways.

Still, try as I might, people interpret my writing in their own way. It's like we have different execution environments that we call our brains and the words will never execute quite the same way.

Writing to people helps me see the different ways in which people interpret my words and I can use that to debug my writing, which hopefully improves as a result over time. People are not just execution environments of my writing, but also test harnesses. And Twitter/Nostr are ways to unit test different snippets.

Writing helps coding and vice versa. Even in that last sentence I thought about saying instead "writing helps coding and coding helps writing." Which is clearer? Are there some non-English speakers that maybe don't understand "vice versa"? Does the latter flow a little better on the tongue? Is the user experience better on the former?

I write because I want to improve my craft, both as a writer and a coder.