> Every generation laughs at all the stupid stuff the previous generations believed, and then acts so confident that they’ve got it right this time.
Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote a satirical account of a medieval university's oral examination on medicine: the examiner asks why morphine puts people to sleep, and the student confidently replies that morphine has a "dormative essence". This is a bit like saying that things with an essence of gravity fall towards the earth, whereas things with an essence of levity float towards the sky. The examiner proudly accepts that answer and bestows upon the student the title of doctor.
This was very funny to anyone educated in the time Voltaire was writing, since they would have known that morphine puts people to sleep because... it has round molecules with no sharp edges...
They're both new versions of an ancient archetype of IT. When they are correct, it seems that their priority is being correct, rather than productively informing others.
This attitude ignores a fundamental truth of any industry; "perfect" is the enemy of "finished", and if I can get to "good enough to ship" without having smug perfectionists on my team, then I won't have them on my team.
The above reasoning is altered if the smug perfectionist is a totally unique and unreplaceable talent, or if the project truly requires a degree of perfectionism (e.g. medical devices, avionics). But that's... largely not what Blow and Casey talk about...
Given that, my response to these guys is to paraphrase Mark Twain: sorry I wrote a complicated program, I didn't have time to write a simple one.
> A lot of tech people don't enjoy writing, but also they're sometimes not very good at predicting or empathizing with the future reader of their writing.
Agreed, wholeheartedly. Will hitchhike on your comment to recommend two things: Brett Victor's pdf stash [1] and, specifically, the Walter Ong essay "The Writer's Audience is Always a Fiction"[2].
Long story short, we form our audiences by subjecting them to our writing. In writing software documentation, we are implicitly informing the next generation's thought by the simple power dynamic that underlies all technical documentation: "you must understand this in order to do your job properly".
It is no wonder that "form", "inform", and "information" are such closely related words.
We dictate the level of rigor and intelligibility we expect out of our technical documentation, when we write technical documents. It almost sounds like a tautology when put this way, but "bad docs" are exclusively the result of a professional culture that puts up with the existence of bad docs. I've been there; too tired and overworked to care about writing something properly, or wanting to avoid writing a doc enough that I setup some autodoc thing and called it a day. We literally don't get paid for writing documentation.
But good documentation is what made us into good developers (if we are good developers). We should get paid for doing that...
Voltaire (1694-1778) wrote a satirical account of a medieval university's oral examination on medicine: the examiner asks why morphine puts people to sleep, and the student confidently replies that morphine has a "dormative essence". This is a bit like saying that things with an essence of gravity fall towards the earth, whereas things with an essence of levity float towards the sky. The examiner proudly accepts that answer and bestows upon the student the title of doctor.
This was very funny to anyone educated in the time Voltaire was writing, since they would have known that morphine puts people to sleep because... it has round molecules with no sharp edges...
Edit: correction below, thank you thaumasiotes.