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Absolutely other fields use their "abilities to make their abilities easier". As a coders we live in abstractions and you should be seeing them everywhere. Wri

Absolutely other fields use their "abilities to make their abilities easier". As a coders we live in abstractions and you should be seeing them everywhere. Writers work with words, but some smart writers invented sentences as tools to help structure them. Some other writers invented paragraphs to structure those sentences. Some even smarter writers invented novels, short stories, screenplays, etc. These are all tools built with writers tools to make writing easier. The processors you use to run your code are tools made by electrical engineers built with logic gates, which are tools they built on top of electrical components, which are tools themselves. etc etc etc.

ThePawnBreak 14y ago
Short stories, screenplays and novels are definitely not tools, since you don't build stuff with them, they are finished works, and if you want to make another one, you have to start from scratch. I'd argue there are more similar to frameworks, but less powerful, since the structure of a novel only gives you a basic idea of how the end product should look, instead of doing any actual work for you.
- FreakLegion 14y ago
  The novel, short story and so on are absolutely tools used to build things[1]. So are genres (sci-fi, fantasy), narrative modes (free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness), and even rhythms or styles (see the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses for an extreme example). Concepts are generative: if you decide to write a Künstlerroman, a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you. That said, a single writer can't, as a general rule[2], "use [their] ability to make using [their] ability easier" in this way, since genres, modes and the like don't "just work." Even when they descend from the work of one or a few innovators, there's a long process of consensus-building that has to take place before new concepts become conventional and, as a result, productive. 1. The screenplay (for both film and television) in particular is structurally very rigid, although slug lines and such admit more variation than most people think. And the actual writing is capable of great variety. Check out the original Alien script (http://sfy.ru/?script=alien http://sfy.ru/?script=alien) or the Alien-inspired style of WALL•E. 2. Though of course it happens: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, et al.
bmj 14y ago
It's been almost 15 years since my linguistics courses, but I'm pretty sure the spoken word (along with the grammars that bounded it) existed long before writing. I also believe you drawing correlations between human languages and computer languages that don't exist. Computer language designers define syntax and grammar initially. Human language develops far more organically (to put it another way, where's the spec for American English?). Certainly, human language gets bounded by rules, but not in the same way as code does.
- adavies42 14y ago
  programming languages are often less "designed" than you might think. consider the history of C: the path leading up to the first formal spec, ANSI C 89, was twenty years long and involved endless mutations and competing versions--commonly called "dialects"! many languages (perl, python, etc.) have only a reference implementation, not a spec per se, and things like HTML (not precisely a programming language, but definitely a computer language) are so flexible and underspecified in practice as to resemble human language quite closely.

ThePawnBreak 14y ago

Short stories, screenplays and novels are definitely not tools, since you don't build stuff with them, they are finished works, and if you want to make another one, you have to start from scratch. I'd argue there are more similar to frameworks, but less powerful, since the structure of a novel only gives you a basic idea of how the end product should look, instead of doing any actual work for you.

FreakLegion 14y ago
The novel, short story and so on are absolutely tools used to build things[1]. So are genres (sci-fi, fantasy), narrative modes (free indirect discourse, stream of consciousness), and even rhythms or styles (see the Oxen of the Sun episode of Ulysses for an extreme example). Concepts are generative: if you decide to write a Künstlerroman, a lot of the heavy lifting is done for you. That said, a single writer can't, as a general rule[2], "use [their] ability to make using [their] ability easier" in this way, since genres, modes and the like don't "just work." Even when they descend from the work of one or a few innovators, there's a long process of consensus-building that has to take place before new concepts become conventional and, as a result, productive. 1. The screenplay (for both film and television) in particular is structurally very rigid, although slug lines and such admit more variation than most people think. And the actual writing is capable of great variety. Check out the original Alien script (http://sfy.ru/?script=alien http://sfy.ru/?script=alien) or the Alien-inspired style of WALL•E. 2. Though of course it happens: T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, et al.

bmj 14y ago

It's been almost 15 years since my linguistics courses, but I'm pretty sure the spoken word (along with the grammars that bounded it) existed long before writing. I also believe you drawing correlations between human languages and computer languages that don't exist. Computer language designers define syntax and grammar initially. Human language develops far more organically (to put it another way, where's the spec for American English?). Certainly, human language gets bounded by rules, but not in the same way as code does.

adavies42 14y ago
programming languages are often less "designed" than you might think. consider the history of C: the path leading up to the first formal spec, ANSI C 89, was twenty years long and involved endless mutations and competing versions--commonly called "dialects"! many languages (perl, python, etc.) have only a reference implementation, not a spec per se, and things like HTML (not precisely a programming language, but definitely a computer language) are so flexible and underspecified in practice as to resemble human language quite closely.