A good novel must also succeed in the same two scales of the micro and the macro. Good code must be composed of well written and readable single statements, but overall the different parts of the program must be orthogonal, designed in a coherent way, and have clean interactions. There is, however, a much deeper connection between the two activities: a good program and a good novel are both the sum of local and global elements that work well. Code is not prose written in a natural language, yet it has a set of fixed rules (a grammar), certain forms that most programmers will understand as natural and others that, while formally correct, will sound hard to grasp. The most obvious parallel between the two activities is that in both of them you write something. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes. One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. Programming and Writing antirez 710 days ago.
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