# Programming and Writing

DevFeed: [Programming and Writing](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/programming-and-writing-20626.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<http://antirez.com/news/135>)

Published: 2021-05-14T09:47:18Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Antirez](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/antirez.md>)

Topics: [Programming](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/programming.md>), [Code](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/code.md>)

Tags: [code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/code.md>), [programming](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/programming.md>), [writing-code](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/writing-code.md>)

## AI overview

The author argues that programming and novel writing share important processes: both require attention to grammar, local details, overall structure, coherent relationships, and consistent daily effort. Years of writing code also helped the author understand writer's block and sustain progress on a novel.

## Source excerpt

One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I'm pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes. The most obvious parallel between the two activities is that in both of them you write something. Code is not prose written in a natural language, yet it has a set of fixed rules (a grammar), certain forms that most programmers will understand as natural and others that, while formally correct, will sound hard to grasp. There is, however, a much deeper connection between the two activities: a good program and a good novel are both the sum of local and global elements that work well. Good code must be composed of well written and readable single statements, but overall the different parts of the program must be orthogonal, designed in a coherent way, and have clean interactions. A good novel must also succeed in the same two scales of the micro and the macro. Sentences must be well written, but the overall structure and relationship between the parts is also crucial. A less structural link between programming and writing is in the drive you need when approaching one or the other: to succeed you need to make progresses, and to make progresses you have to be consistent. There is extensive agreement on the fact that programs and novels don't write themselves, yet. Twenty years of writing code helped me immensely with this aspect; I knew that things happen only if you sit every day and write: one day one hundred words, the other day two thousands, but rare is the day I don't put words on the page. And if you have written code that is not just a "filler" for a bigger system, but a creation of your own, you know that writer block also happens in programming. The only difference is that for most people you are an engineer, hence, if you don't wo