The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn't write.
Edit: I'm not sure I agree with the (slickedit) post, though. Saying "Learn to write" is more like saying "Learn to think" than "Learn to drive". One can improve and refine, but by the time a person gets to be a professional programmer I don't think one is likely to see order-of-magnitude improvement.
But good writers are far more likely to do these things than bad writers are. Among what Greenspun calls the "average-quality programmers", I can't think of many who could care less about reading good prose (they read MSDN at best), or about rewriting anything at all (even their code).
Absolutely, but I've been seeing a trend here. Two kinds of great hackers
a)-Great writers and they write good stuff e.g. PG.
b)-Great hackers but they don't write a thing e.g. RTM. Yeah, I know he and other such hackers write plethora of cool academic papers but I always wish if more great hackers like RTM & others would write stuff for public en-masse. May be, this is just not possible. Just a mere wish.
speaking of slickedit, it's a very good editor. it has all the source editing stuff you could want like intellisense and tagging and whatnot, along with emulation for a bunch of editors like VS, emacs, vim. if i didn't use so many of the advanced features of the official vim i would use slickedit
I absolutely agree... If you can't read your code, it shouldn't have been written in the first place. Otherwise, there's no way you'll be able to debug it when something goes wrong six months from now.
He was an introvert in a workspace full of extroverts. Working to short time lines in a code monkey shop reporting to various non-technical managers.
The lifespan of a tech skill
The tools are chosen for him.
The golden rule of documenting software design
The products are designed by committee on paper and changed at regular intervals. Everyone had a good, different idea of what constituted the final product.
The people who were really good software engineers were usually great writers; they had tremendous ability to organize their thoughts and communicate. The people who were sort of average-quality programmers and had trouble thinking about the larger picture were the ones who couldn't write.
I posted this before (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=127743), but that thread was already old, and it's relevant here too.
Edit: I'm not sure I agree with the (slickedit) post, though. Saying "Learn to write" is more like saying "Learn to think" than "Learn to drive". One can improve and refine, but by the time a person gets to be a professional programmer I don't think one is likely to see order-of-magnitude improvement.