Posted on 09/11/2014 3:52:52 AM PDT by lifeofgrace
They say I need to figure out what my readers want to read, and write that. They say I’m supposed to get inside your heads and touch your emotions, hopes and fears. They.
You know, the experts. People who know. They say a lot of things. Trouble is, I don’t listen to them. Plus, my mind doesn’t work the same way as most people. Really, it doesn’t.
One of my few skills is writing computer programs. I’ve been coding since I was 13, and that would warm Bill Gates’ heart, since coding is now considered a basic survival skill. When I write computer programs, and other people look at them, a lot of times they can’t figure out what the heck my code is supposed to do. I even explain it to them and they shake their heads and tell me it shouldn’t even work at all, never mind do what I just explained.
A good friend told me that I have one of those minds that uses “exclusive NORs”. I had to look that up because I had no idea what it is. Here’s a link to it. I read it and still don’t understand fully. I think it means that the world thinks in light and dark and I think in X-rays and negatives. So when everyone else sees a straightforward solution to a problem, I see it in opposite-world. Frequently I come to the same conclusions as people living in the regular space-time continuum of thought, and many times I get there faster than the straightforward thinkers (must be a wormhole in my brain). But when I write computer programs, my logic becomes impossible for others to penetrate (yet my programs tend to be shorter, more efficient, and faster than others). It’s a gift, what can I say?
Back to writing. How can I get inside anyone’s head if they think in black and white and I think in X-rays? I suppose I could seek an audience of X-ray thinkers like me, call myself Professor X and open a school. I could call it Xavier’s School for X-Ray Thinkers. I’m pretty sure someone’s already thought of it.
They also say I need to write in complete sentences. You know, with a subject, a predicate, and a verb indicating action. Yuck. It’s just so uninteresting to write that way. It’s like trying to get e.e. cummings to write in iambic pentameter. Not gonna happen. Now before you tell me that I’m simply an uneducated hick who can’t write properly, let me confess that I actually can write in complete sentences. I can conjugate verbs with the best of them. I was even an English major in college. For one whole semester. It happened because my application for the business school was one day late and they rejected it, leaving me as an “undeclared liberal arts” major entering my junior year, which the University of New Hampshire did not permit. I had to declare a major, or become an ex-college student. Having no major to declare, I set out to fake my way through.
One of my many jobs during college was selling computers, and this time it paid off for me. I had sold a computer to the English department student advisor, who had the power to admit me in that major. I gave him a really good deal, as I recall. He owed me a favor, and I eagerly called it in. Sign here, and I was an English major. I even took a creative writing class to make it look good. I have no memory of how I did in that class. Writing creatively because some professor assigned you a project is self-contradictory, in my opinion. How can you be forced to be creative? How can true creativity be judged by something so mundane as a letter grade? I’m sure I did impressively well; at least that’s my story.
I don’t know how novelists do it, with deadlines and all, pressure from publishers, to write that next book. Do it, and be creative, dang-it-all. There’s nothing sadder than sitting pregnant with an idea, with the anvil of a deadline hanging above your head by a frayed thread, with a pristine field of white before your eyes (either blank paper, or worse, a mocking empty Word document with that flashing cursor just throbbing at your skull). I can imagine this, but I don’t know it personally, since I’ve never had a deadline to write anything since college. Typically when I’m pregnant with an idea, I indulge it in cravings like ice cream and cupcakes, which satisfies the muse and the feeling passes.
They say I won’t make it as a blogger, because there like two hundred million blogs in the US, with another 172,800 added every day. That’s like 16 times the number of babies born each day in this country. I find the number hard to believe because most people are just too lazy to blog. Let’s say ten percent of the blogs are being updated: that’s 20 million blogs. It’s far better than the odds of winning Powerball, which is 175,223,510 to 1. This means I have a chance to be one of those influential bloggers who get to tell others why they are going to fail. So you’re telling me there’s a chance…YEAH!
If I become one of those influential few bloggers who get paid to write (complete with deadlines, anvils and mocking blank pages), I can be one of “them” and bestow upon myself the Blessed Order of They. When I speak, I can knowingly say “they say” and mean “I say”. When others speak of me in hushed tones, “they say…” will precede every perfect pearl of wisdom uttered from my mouth or keyed from my anointed keyboard (“wow, that’s his laptop” will be heard in the blogger hall of fame when they retire my writing instrument to posterity). I can be one of the experts who gives webinars on how to make money selling webinars about blogging.
I might even get rich and have news shows knocking on my door to ply my pundit-flavored sayings and prognostications. And it won’t make one bit of difference if I answer right or wrong. When you’re rich they think you really know.
My flight of fancy has ended with my mind right back in X-ray land where it started. I have no better idea of what to write to my readers (do I have any?) than when I first started. I think I’ll just continue writing about stuff I know. Exposing injustice, lies, evil, and filth in the world, while lifting up truth, love, and God’s plan for us all. Me and God, we’re mates…we have an understanding. I think in X-rays, and he has X-ray vision like Superman. We get along great, it’s like he can read my mind.
The experts say don’t write about religion on political blogs, and definitely don’t write long-winded crap like this on serious blogs. They say. Bah. I never listened to them anyway.
P.S. I know e.e. cummings has been dead for 52 years and 7 days. He’s not writing anything anymore. Like all good weird writers and hermits, cummings moved from Greenwich Village to the White Mountains of New Hampshire (where all great writers, hermits and curmudgeons end up, just ask Mark Steyn).
A competent, professional software engineer will write software so that anyone with a minimal background in programming will understand it.
: )
Couldn’t agree more. You develop code not for yourself, but for the others who will maintain it after you are gone. Any other mindset is unprofessional.
Unless, of course, he is crafting his entry into the International Obfuscated C Code Contest.
“I got so sick from speeding
All the stuff they said I was needing
If I was to keep pleasing
All of my fans..........”
Hank Williams Jr - “Blues Man”
In my business, the design of railroad signal systems, there are standard ways of doing almost everything. For 40 years, I've had it beat into my head that 'that's the way we do things around here.'
As a result, I can tell almost at a glance if a particular circuit (or equivalent line of code) will work or not. Yes, there are always different ways to do most everything, but one MUST understand ALL the nuances of the traditional way of doing things before stepping out onto the ledge of innovation.
Lucky for me I’m an executive not a competent, professional software engineer. However I do occasionally write code. And if you’ve examined Microsoft’s archived code or Apple’s old code, your hypothesis disproves itself.
So the readability of Microsoft’s and Apple’s code is low, or the code is readable, but the quality is low? What are you trying to say? That readability is not the key component to maintainability?
Ha, tell that to all the under 35 crowd that work for me that are always trying to lay in 4-5 levels of abstraction and inheritance on an 20 year old windows application that is very myopic in scope for the industry we serve. They just look at me with blank stares when I ask why we need such abstraction when we do not support any SOAP our outside calls and we are not a tool set or generic service. None of them have heard of KISS.
I find that the majority of coders are so use to using tools and frameworks to build their stuff that they think they have to design like the very generic tools they use when in fact all they need is very specific and targeted code to achieve their goals. Problem is that most of them do not really understand memory management, call stacks, and threads and their convoluted code reflects it.
Back in the old C days is was a game to be as cryptic as possible now the style is to try and lay in as many levels of base classes and interfaces as you can with no real gain.
I’ve often wondered if the reason for such unnecessary abstraction and obfuscation was job security. I always tried to remember that I’m probably going to have to come back to this code in a few months, so I’d better write it so that I can figure it out after not looking at it for a long time. This means that someone else should also be able to figure it out. Write the code to solve the problem. No more and no less.
I’m saying I’d rather write prose than code anyway.
That’s terrific, but how does that disprove my assertion?
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