Coders at Work: Reflections on the Craft of Programming

by Peter Seibel

Seibel: Do you find that programming and writing are similar intellectual exercises? Zawinski: In some ways, yeah. Programming is obviously much more rigid. But as far as the overall ability to express a thought, they're very similar. Not rambling, having an idea in your head of what you're trying to say, and then being concise about it. I think that kind of thinking is the overlap between programming and writing prose. It feels like they use similar parts of my brain, but it's hard to express exactly what it is. A lot of times I'll read things that just look like bad code. Like most contracts. The really rigid style they use—it's so repetitive. I look at that and I'm like, why can't you break this out into a subroutine—which we call paragraphs. And the way they usually begin with definitions, like, so and so, referred to as blah blah blah.

the contract part feels familiar, although i don't think I've thought about it exactly in those terms