Letters To A Software Practitioner

Beautifully wrought prose, many will agree, wields the power to make one's heart skip a beat. And elegantly crafted code has been known to make a heart sing. So why has nobody looked at these seemingly unrelated phenomena as a unified whole?We can, as the author demonstrates in this book, divergent thinking-style, look past the superficial similarities between the endeavor each of crafting prose and that of designing code-writers rewrite their prose while programmers refactor their code, both work with abstractions, neither is immune to the occasional blockage of creative flow, which manifests itself in the writer's block and in the coder's jam, respectively, and so on. That's quotidian stuff.And much deeper forces are at play, the author believes, forces which inform their respective practice: How best to tease those out into revealing themselves so we can witness those forces in their glory? Enter this book. Written as a series of letters to the practitioner, it connects the dots between the ins and outs of crafting prose and those of designing code-tying the two together with the proverbial marriage knot-by delving deep into the interplay between the two. No longer will we have to scratch our head, wondering why nobody took on this vital interplay sooner.In this book, the author takes on nothing less than a rejuvenation of the craft by drawing on his experience of two decades as (1) a devoted software practitioner, and as (2) an inveterate writer. (He happens to be the impresario of the immensely popular blog for geeks and non-geeks alike: "ProgrammingDigressions.")Among the many reflections which await you in the pages of this book: Can a practitioner care as much about the craft of prose as about designing code? Is one born with the skill of writing well, or can it be cultivated? More fundamentally, how best to learn things deeply and to their core? Where will our insatiable thirst for collecting idioms lead us? Does it make sense to diversify? More pointedly, how best to engage both our left brain (think the analytical and the logical) and the right brain (think the creative and the inspired) in our daily work? This book is for geeks and non-geeks alike.Coming on the heels of the author's two acclaimed books-"Dispatches from the Software Trenches" and "Postcards From The Software Island"-in "The Programming Imagination" series, this book is for anyone who believes that playfulness is decidedly underrated, that life is positively not a zero-sum game, and it's especially for those who seek to rejuvenate the craft itself. Hence, the subtitle, "Essays on Rejuvenating the Craft."Oh, so the author (himself a non-native speaker and lover of the English language) wishes to make it abundantly clear that he does not consider himself a modern-day Joseph Conrad (who just happened to be another non-native speaker of the English language.) Far from it, though the author candidly professes to have taken inspiration from at least some of the prose passages by said Polish writer, one who is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in the English language, and one who, relevantly enough to the ethos of this book, famously remarked how "My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see." Wow! Talk about a lofty ideal. And if the book you hold takes you a modest halfway to that ideal, the author will chalk this up as "job accomplished."