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Words Spent – Power Overwhelming

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One of my favorite Djikstra programming quotes is about thinking via “lines of code spent” rather than “lines of code produced”. I started using this as a philosophy in my writing too: words spent. One of the things that’s surprised me about student writing is how poorly words are spent. You’ll have a solution where the trivial boilerplate steps are painfully verbose, and then the actually important parts are missing all the critical details. I wonder how much of this is because of crummy writing advice. In school essays, even when you have nothing meaningful to say, teachers often impose a minimum word count1 as a “proof of work”. The implied conclusion is that writing many words is the goal. Which is same mistake that counting “lines of code produced” is. More careful teachers might talk about being concise, and might impose a maximum word count instead (or in addition). Then students get the idea you have this elastic dial that goes from “too little detail” to “too much detail”, and

Words Spent One of my favorite Djikstra programming quotes is about thinking via “lines of code spent” rather than “lines of code produced”. I started using this as a philosophy in my writing too: words spent . Background One of the things that’s surprised me about student writing is how poorly words are spent. You’ll have a solution where the trivial boilerplate steps are painfully verbose, and then the actually important parts are missing all the critical details. I wonder how much of this is because of crummy writing advice. In school essays, even when you have nothing meaningful to say, te

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