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The issue here is that those 160k insertions and 130k deletions don't really mean he wrote 160k lines of text. The way VCS works, any edit would register as an

The issue here is that those 160k insertions and 130k deletions don't really mean he wrote 160k lines of text. The way VCS works, any edit would register as an insertion and deletion. The way writing a book works, is you write some kind of draft and then mercilessly edit by rearranging things and changing words. But you don't change every single word 10 times. Moving stuff around creates a lot of edits very quickly -- moving a paragraph creates many lines of insertions and deletions but I would never count that as rewriting all those lines. The same goes for editing words -- changing a word will change entire line (insertion/deletion). If this also rearranges paragraph (due to line breaking) it may cause a lot of edits. So I don't really buy into the whole premise of this article.

specialist 8y ago
Anecdote from Alan Rinzler about editing novelist Tom Robbins: "On sticking with it until it’s right “Challenge every single sentence for lucidity, accuracy, originality, and cadence. If it doesn’t meet the challenge, work on it until it does.” While I was editing Jitterbug Perfume, Tom would read me a passage aloud to see how it sounded. Sometimes I’d comment, sometimes I wouldn’t. But each time I heard it again, it had changed. I saw how many times he would rewrite a passage and how much he relished doing it. “Sometimes 40 times,” he told me. He took the process of conception, research, trial and error very seriously, moving things around, changing voices and pitch. He wrote slowly and carefully, revised constantly, refining and evolving the novel over the course of about two years." https://alanrinzler.com/2013/07/happy-birthday-tom-robbins-time-to-revisit-your-advice-to-writers/ https://alanrinzler.com/2013/07/happy-birthday-tom-robbins-t... YMMV
- ScottBurson 8y ago
  I faintly recall an anecdote about a writer who, when asked what writing they did yesterday, said "I put in a comma" -- "and what did you do today?" -- "I took it out again." Maybe some HNer will recognize the story and remind me who it was about :-)
  - pedrosorio 8y ago
    Oscar Wilde: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/
worldsayshi 8y ago
Wouldn't you at least agree that the ratio of edits to end text is at least closer to 10:1 than to 1:1 though?
- mattmanser 8y ago
  I've just finished a site, over the last 3 months. The vast majority of lines are exactly the same as they were when I first wrote them. I cannot comprehend how he wrote 37,000 lines just to get 7,000. Perhaps my problem was easier, but it's a domain I didn't know particularly well though and made a few erroneous assumptions about. Most of the code I got right first time, save a few minor bugs here and there.
  - lmilcin 8y ago
    Well, I guess it depends on how you work and the type of work you do. When I worked as a translator (I had an episode translating books from English to Polish) I would more or less write the final version of the text and there would be very few edits. The plan for the text was set by the original so my job was basically to figure out the way to express it in Polish. On the other hand, when I started writing my own texts I would spend much more time editing. I would write passages that I wanted to include, but then I would move them around a lot so that they make more sense for the reader, for example. The same with programming. When I know very well what I am building there would be very few edits. I would start bottom up writing modules and tools and abstractions that I know I will need later and build on it. A website would be a good example. It is not a rocket science. Once you design your UI, processes, it is fairly straightforward to translate it to code. Again, if I work on something very tricky, there is A LOT of edits. My other project is an embedded controller for an espresso machine. I am building this controller from scratch, meaning I design the board, then I receive PCB from manufacturer, then place and solder all components. The code is for ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller which I am getting to know. I would say most of the code was edited many, many times over because of many iterations I need to get stuff working and then to refactor it to integrate with the structure of the application.
- eslaught 8y ago
  My experience with writing is that edits feel much larger while you're making them. But when you take the final version and actually diff it to the original, and take into account e.g. moving rather than deleting and rewriting text, then the differences are actually quite small. The main exception is when you literally throw everything away and start from scratch. The odds of writing the exact same words twice are basically nil. But I'm not sure this should count as "editing" in the same sense as when I'm doing word-and-line copy editing. I haven't done a rigorous comparison with code, but it would be interesting to take a tool like Moss and see how similar it thinks the code is after <N> revisions of the source.
brikis98 8y ago
Author here. I very much do understand that one line of "insertion" or "deletion" doesn't necessarily mean the entire line was rewritten. But as I wrote in the blog post, there are also many types of changes missing from the data: 1. I don't do a commit for every single line that I change. In fact, I may change a line 10 times, and commit only once. 2. This is actually even more pronounced for code. While doing a code-test cycle, I may change a few lines of code 50 times over, but only do one commit. 3. For my books, a lot of edit rounds and writing happened outside of Git (e.g., O'Reilly does copyediting in a PDF). My guess is that these two factors roughly cancel out. It won't be exact, of course, and the actual ratio may be 8:1 or 12:1, but the order of magnitude is probably correct.
- lmilcin 8y ago
  You have used some numbers to substantiate an idea. Then made a fleeting mention the numbers don't mean anything. Then decided that you also do other stuff and "you guess" it cancels each other.

specialist 8y ago

Anecdote from Alan Rinzler about editing novelist Tom Robbins: "On sticking with it until it’s right “Challenge every single sentence for lucidity, accuracy, originality, and cadence. If it doesn’t meet the challenge, work on it until it does.” While I was editing Jitterbug Perfume, Tom would read me a passage aloud to see how it sounded. Sometimes I’d comment, sometimes I wouldn’t. But each time I heard it again, it had changed. I saw how many times he would rewrite a passage and how much he relished doing it. “Sometimes 40 times,” he told me. He took the process of conception, research, trial and error very seriously, moving things around, changing voices and pitch. He wrote slowly and carefully, revised constantly, refining and evolving the novel over the course of about two years." https://alanrinzler.com/2013/07/happy-birthday-tom-robbins-time-to-revisit-your-advice-to-writers/ https://alanrinzler.com/2013/07/happy-birthday-tom-robbins-t... YMMV

ScottBurson 8y ago
I faintly recall an anecdote about a writer who, when asked what writing they did yesterday, said "I put in a comma" -- "and what did you do today?" -- "I took it out again." Maybe some HNer will recognize the story and remind me who it was about :-)
- pedrosorio 8y ago
  Oscar Wilde: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/

worldsayshi 8y ago

Wouldn't you at least agree that the ratio of edits to end text is at least closer to 10:1 than to 1:1 though?

mattmanser 8y ago
I've just finished a site, over the last 3 months. The vast majority of lines are exactly the same as they were when I first wrote them. I cannot comprehend how he wrote 37,000 lines just to get 7,000. Perhaps my problem was easier, but it's a domain I didn't know particularly well though and made a few erroneous assumptions about. Most of the code I got right first time, save a few minor bugs here and there.
- lmilcin 8y ago
  Well, I guess it depends on how you work and the type of work you do. When I worked as a translator (I had an episode translating books from English to Polish) I would more or less write the final version of the text and there would be very few edits. The plan for the text was set by the original so my job was basically to figure out the way to express it in Polish. On the other hand, when I started writing my own texts I would spend much more time editing. I would write passages that I wanted to include, but then I would move them around a lot so that they make more sense for the reader, for example. The same with programming. When I know very well what I am building there would be very few edits. I would start bottom up writing modules and tools and abstractions that I know I will need later and build on it. A website would be a good example. It is not a rocket science. Once you design your UI, processes, it is fairly straightforward to translate it to code. Again, if I work on something very tricky, there is A LOT of edits. My other project is an embedded controller for an espresso machine. I am building this controller from scratch, meaning I design the board, then I receive PCB from manufacturer, then place and solder all components. The code is for ARM Cortex-M4 microcontroller which I am getting to know. I would say most of the code was edited many, many times over because of many iterations I need to get stuff working and then to refactor it to integrate with the structure of the application.
eslaught 8y ago
My experience with writing is that edits feel much larger while you're making them. But when you take the final version and actually diff it to the original, and take into account e.g. moving rather than deleting and rewriting text, then the differences are actually quite small. The main exception is when you literally throw everything away and start from scratch. The odds of writing the exact same words twice are basically nil. But I'm not sure this should count as "editing" in the same sense as when I'm doing word-and-line copy editing. I haven't done a rigorous comparison with code, but it would be interesting to take a tool like Moss and see how similar it thinks the code is after <N> revisions of the source.

brikis98 8y ago

Author here. I very much do understand that one line of "insertion" or "deletion" doesn't necessarily mean the entire line was rewritten. But as I wrote in the blog post, there are also many types of changes missing from the data: 1. I don't do a commit for every single line that I change. In fact, I may change a line 10 times, and commit only once. 2. This is actually even more pronounced for code. While doing a code-test cycle, I may change a few lines of code 50 times over, but only do one commit. 3. For my books, a lot of edit rounds and writing happened outside of Git (e.g., O'Reilly does copyediting in a PDF). My guess is that these two factors roughly cancel out. It won't be exact, of course, and the actual ratio may be 8:1 or 12:1, but the order of magnitude is probably correct.

lmilcin 8y ago
You have used some numbers to substantiate an idea. Then made a fleeting mention the numbers don't mean anything. Then decided that you also do other stuff and "you guess" it cancels each other.