Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

May 20, 2011

Writing software is harder than writing books – Post

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence — Patrick Durusau @ 4:06 pm

Writing software is harder than writing books

John D. Cook quotes Donald Knuth’s discovery that writing software such as TeX is much harder than writing books. In part:

Another is that programming demands a significantly higher standard of accuracy. Programs don’t simply have to make sense to another human being, they must make sense to a computer.

It occurs to me that there is a corollary to that statement:

Teaching is hard than writing books.

A book, at a minimum, only has to make sense to its author.

Teaching, the successful kind, has to make sense to other human beings.

And, it demands a significantly higher degree of imagination, to successfully impart information to students.

Perhaps programming and teaching occupy different ends of a “hardness” spectrum with regard to book writing.

Programming is harder because computers are literal and dumb, teaching is harder because students are non-literal and intelligent.

1 Comment

  1. That’s true writing a software needs programming knowledge and programming needs lots of accuracy but writing a book needs only creativity.

    Comment by daceymathers — May 25, 2011 @ 12:57 am

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