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.
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