This is a strange read as a fiction writer. This lesson is learned quite early in prose writing- explicitly due to the fact that written works must be read. Maybe because of this, I've never felt the need to write 'cleverly' in my programming either. Can other prose writers corroborate?
I believe that approaching writing, including programming, to this, is reductive.
At its base level, this is missing an important thing: context. Clear to who? Something can be very clear to one person, yet opaque to another. In writing, and in programming, you need to decide which audience that you're talking to, and write something that they will understand.
This often comes up in discussions about jargon. Jargon is a way to increase the density of communication. This is often perceived as a loss of clarity, but the question again is, clarity for who? For two experts, discussing complex things in their field of expertise, jargon can increase clarity, by referring to shared context. Higher bandwidth communication allows for more discussion of more complex topics, because you're not wasting time and mental energy re-explaining things from first principles.
Put another way, there is always some shared context going on; that's what language actually is in the first place. I have used a number of words in writing this comment, but I haven't set out any definitions; that's because I'm assuming that you know English in order to read my comment. If I were trying to communicate to a child, I wouldn't be using all of the words that I'm using here, because it is too complicated for them to comprehend. But, trying to explain the topic of this comment to that child would take much longer, and be much more difficult.
So yeah, that's just one way in which discussions like these tend to frustrate me. Writing is a rich, wonderful thing, that has a huge variety of uses. Pigeon-holing it in this way makes me feel, well, dispirited. Or should I say "sad"...
(I do believe that, for both commercial development of software, as well as commercial development of writing, "keeping things simple" can be important, for various reasons. But not everything we do in life must be in the service of business needs.)
> This often comes up in discussions about jargon. Jargon is a way to increase the density of communication. This is often perceived as a loss of clarity, but the question again is, clarity for who? For two experts, discussing complex things in their field of expertise, jargon can increase clarity, by referring to shared context. Higher bandwidth communication allows for more discussion of more complex topics, because you're not wasting time and mental energy re-explaining things from first principles.
> Put another way, there is always some shared context going on; that's what language actually is in the first place. I have used a number of words in writing this comment, but I haven't set out any definitions; that's because I'm assuming that you know English in order to read my comment. If I were trying to communicate to a child, I wouldn't be using all of the words that I'm using here, because it is too complicated for them to comprehend. But, trying to explain the topic of this comment to that child would take much longer, and be much more difficult.
Thanks for this. I always struggle to articulate it.
Good prose often involves misdirection. Making the reader believe something to be one way, while it was something else all along. Then, in a built up climax, undo the knot in a single pull to blow the reader's mind. That, to me, is the antithesis of the article's argument.
I think the literary quote is "kill your darlings" and I often find myself thinking of that when I write something that impresses me, and I often revert to something simpler when I can.
