Martin Hähnel

Writing About Coding, Writing About Writing

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Another thought around Write Like You're Ron Jeffries: I really liked what Leon Mika expressed to me about WhileDo posts:

Thanks! I’ll try. Don’t know about you, but I struggle with the amount of writing that goes into these.

And that got me thinking about the artificiality of these kinds of posts. Coding - as are many other activities - are much less sequential or in any case logically sequenced - as it might seem. Weaving into the work of coding another activity of writing about coding changes the whole "experimental arrangement" which also means that reading these reports has to be done with a grain of salt: It is, just like the How-to, a constructed text.

And this made me think about "writing about writing" and how much that is also a weird thing that purports to be merely about its subject but in actuality is actually changing its subject by writing about it and then is doing so in the same medium.

This Ron Jeffries quote actually recognizes this as a feature (not a bug) of incorporating writing into coding:

My pair, such as it is, is the article I write while programming. The writing gives me the chance to see the code from more distance and gives my mind time to come up with alternatives, issues, ideas[…]

But this implies that writing about writing - the act of reflecting on (digital) paper - makes a difference and changes the object under observation - which in turn means we can't really know about writing in itself.