I'm kind of tired of the "programmer's take on craft that's been around for centuries longer than programming" genre. Writers have been using "pseudoprose" for eons, they are called "outlines" and "notes". Just like we don't necessarily need programming languages for recipes in the kitchen.
What's up with programmers and their urge to ignore the rich history of any given subject only to fart out a piece on "here's how we could suck all the life and art out of X and make it just like programming!"
No particular offense intended to the author. General ignorance of other art forms and desperate, half-baked, square-peg-in-round-hole attempts to understand everything in terms of programming is just a definite style of thinking that I find extremely frustrating, and it's not clear to me why programmers in particular seem to be so susceptible to such totalizing, reductive forms of thought. You don't see many writers going around writing pieces on "gerunds for code" and things like that. Jeez.
I'm 100% guilty of applying to "programmer's brain" to everything. You'd cringe if you saw the alt music notation I've been working on for the past decade. It's an ascii abomination. Seriously, it's got functions and everything is represented in base twelve.
Anyway, I thought pseudoprose was worth sharing because of how LLMs might change the writing process itself. I've been experimenting with using GPT to expand ultra-condensed notes into essays. But I've found that I'm too obsessive over my writing voice to ever let it fill in gaps for me haha
But even without LLMs, I still naturally gravitate to writing with pseudoprose. It's how I've taught myself to structure thoughts. But maybe thoughts don't need structure, and that's just my programmer's brain imposing order on the orderless :)
i'm opposite the guy who 'critiqued' you.
I appreciate 'programmers' approaching 100year old crafts, and instead of blindingly accepting 'you MUST do it this way!', they curiously investigate and consider the 'but WHYs' of doing it a particular way.
If the old way is any good, it can stand up to this informed scrutiny..
OTOH, every toddler inventing his own broken javascript-dialect-framework with 5 broken square wheels every 6 minutes, THAT I could do without..
Base 12 is awesome. I've worked extensively in Base 12 on some music-related hobby projects and it makes me resent humans for having 10 fingers, which probably lead to our Base 10/decimal reality. Base 12/the dozenal system is objectively superior in so many ways.
Funny thing about the fingers. There are twelve knuckles comprising the non-thumb fingers on one hand. I think that fact has actually influenced some civilizations to a base 12 number system but I can’t remember specifically which.
> Seriously, it's got functions and everything is represented in base twelve.
How is that weird? 12 semitones is pretty traditional and base 12 is generally convenient thanks to 12’s factors. If you want to be really self indulgent go for base 420 so you can evenly divide by 7.
Am I just reading this blog post completely differently? I don't see anything reductive about it...?
It seems to me like a technique for taking some rough stream of consciousness and have ChatGPT generate a complete, fleshed out document from it. It's more than just "notes", it's a specific format and prompt.
Whether it's of any use to you personally (I don't see myself using it, really) is a separate question. But I also don't quite follow what is offensive about it.
It's like the instructions for using ChatGPT to do the grunt work of constructing text, which not being a fan of prose or well-schooled in prose, the author equates with good prose, not realising that writing good prose, at length, is an art and a craft. Oops too many commas.
I guess the part I'm missing, then, is where the author implies that the resulting document is "good prose". One could read such an implication into what's been written here, I suppose. But to me I read more that this technique is just about a producing something useful, not necessarily good (if by "good" we mean "equal in quality to what a skilled writer would have produced after many hours of deep thought").
Not every email we send needs to win a Pulitzer prize, after all.
Hmm, I'm not sure why I should be condemning this. The author didn't shit on any pre-existing technology, they just said "I made a thing". As long as the thing isn't, like, the atom bomb or something, I can only celebrate it.
I'm prepared to be convinced otherwise, but I don't really get this take. It feels like when people started to dabble with electronic music and were told it wasn't "real." The OP creating this idea doesn't take writing away from anyone else, and artistic, whimsical people rocking up into the programming world and introducing more creative ideas into that sphere doesn't take away from the rest of us either – it just makes everything bigger and richer.
Apparently I’m the only one here who agrees with you. The author may be a high IQ genius, but this creation is incredibly grating, in that particular mode of an overenthusiastic mega-autist who sets out to dissect and systematize every last part of the universe. Unnerving to say the least.
> What's up with programmers and their urge to ignore the rich history of any given subject
Isn’t that just what science, mathematics and rationalism in general has always done? Traditional cuisine to food science, farming to agricultural science, religion to physics etc.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, and big advances occasionally come from an outside perspective exploring a field. If a writer came up with a new idea for writing code, I think many people on this site would give it a fair crack of the whip, especially given the history of cross-pollination between linguistics and programming.
I’m more disturbed by your need to rip someone’s work apart for no reason other than it doesn’t line up with your personal philosophy of how writers ought to work. You’ve not graced us with any constructive criticism, just an angry manifesto for why the author is wrong to publish his idea. I put it to you that if you don’t find this idea personally useful, and have nothing useful to add, maybe it’s not aimed at you and you can just skip over to the next article.
I see a couple things interacting here to promote this kind of post.
1. The bar is low to call yourself a programmer and have a programmer's blog. Maybe they have a university degree that required them to take courses in a variety of fields to become well rounded. Maybe they just went to a technical school and got good job experience. Maybe they just jumped into a programming job after dropping out of highschool. They might be very good programmers, but not knowledgeable about anything else and not particularly aware of it.
2. HNews has a lot of programmers in it's membership. Earth shaking stuff from a variety of diverse fields gets promoted because programmers have diverse interests, but they also tend to read a lot of other programmers' blogs and post them, even if they are somewhat less than earthshaking.
Every news source has its weaknesses, and the tendency to see low-effort, poorly researched programmer blog posts promoted above genuinely interesting material is one of HNews's problems.
This comes across as judgemental and elitist. If you want finer content as determined by some group of gatekeepers of your choice, maybe you shouldn't read random blogs.
(I enjoy programming metaphors like the OP as well. URL on my profile.)
What is it about writing that drives people to write lists of imperatives for writing?
As writers we all start somewhere that is some distance away from our taste. As we progress we learn what little tricks we need to tell ourselves to achieve writing that makes us happy when we read it. For me, I might write, “start with the point, then expand; you aren’t writing a mystery novel!”
I see the same pithy stuff in woodworking and software too!
I'm a huge fan of a book called The Inner Game of Tennis. Something I picked up from that book: I think a lot of advice works not because it's correct, but because it causes craftsmen to observe a thing they weren't observing before. "Am I overusing commas?" is a useful but unanswerable question :)
EDIT: The book also makes a strong case against judgmental language, so "overusing" commas is probably not the best word. So instead, maybe, "What do commas make sentences feel like?"
I try not to do it, but I’m absolutely guilty of this. When you start writing, it’s sort of the lowest common denominator topic to write about. You’ll be sitting there thinking what should I write about? So you start writing about writing itself.
This reminds me of something hilarious I saw on Facebook a few years ago. My graphic designer friend was joking about how she has a ton of PSD files in a folder with funny numbers, names, and notes in the filename.
Then, a programmer swooped into the comments section and tried to sell her on the merits of using git for version control. LOL. I nearly died laughing.
There's a meme somewhere about how if hackernews laughs at something, it's six months away from a successful product launch and years of profitable sales.
Ah! How many of her files has "final" in the filenames? ;-)
Well, there was even a "Git for Photoshop." I think it was LayerVault[1] -- a search brings it up.
Of course, yes, the trick with PSDs and static assets during the early days of the web were the file naming patterns. I did one in my 2nd or 3rd job long back (early 2000s), and when I met the team after 10-years; they were happy that they were pretty much still following the convention/pattern that I outlined.
- Code requires creativity
- In that sense it's art
- If code is art... Are LLMs a medium?
- Van Gogh's critics said:
- Thelonius Monk's critics said:
- Edgar Allen Poe's critics said:
> "What's up with artists and their urge to ignore the rich history of any given subject"
Maybe they weren't ignoring it, but building on it.
Or maybe they wanted to tear down the altars, like Dada.
I dunno, it just looks… like an exhibit or something, to me.
Like when a historical figure’s childhood home has been turned into a museum, and each room has been staged to give an impression of what it might have been like while they were alive?
It just looks sterile. Like no one uses it. Real life is so much more cluttered and uncoordinated in my experience.
Or at the very least - my office is an absolute trash heap compared to this.
I quite like this as an exercise in thinking a bit differently about writing. Something missing though is examples - I'd love to see a few raw and final pieces to see how to use it in practice, as well as expanding on the specific recommendations.
I also see this as something to mix in with bits of specific desired prose, much like markdown can always have html plopped into it. When I'm coming up with ideas I often find some really clarifying sentences and metaphors that the piece shapes itself around, which I'll often just pre-highlight so readers know what to take away.
What's up with programmers and their urge to ignore the rich history of any given subject only to fart out a piece on "here's how we could suck all the life and art out of X and make it just like programming!"
No particular offense intended to the author. General ignorance of other art forms and desperate, half-baked, square-peg-in-round-hole attempts to understand everything in terms of programming is just a definite style of thinking that I find extremely frustrating, and it's not clear to me why programmers in particular seem to be so susceptible to such totalizing, reductive forms of thought. You don't see many writers going around writing pieces on "gerunds for code" and things like that. Jeez.