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Old 02-19-2016, 01:58 PM   #44
barryem
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Katsunami View Post
Not a book, but I did write some short stories (and one on Mobileread, last year), and a lot of photography tutorials a few years ago. Writing takes a HUGE amount of time to get it right. Even when writing stuff you know a lot about (in my case, photography), it's nearly impossible to just write and be done with it.
For the first 25 to 30 years I was a programmer I had to write documentation for probably 2/3 of my larger programs. Typically that was between 8 and 25 pages but sometimes it was quite a lot longer. I nearly always did it in a day; sometimes two days. I wrote most of it start to finish, sometimes outlining it first but usually not. After writing it I'd read through it once and make corrections and then I was done.

I always got more compliments on my documentation than on my programs.

I realize that's nothing like writing a novel, which would be much more time consuming, but I think it does illustrate that for some people writing is easier than for others. Just like most things are easier for some than for others.

Most of the programmers I worked with, at least those who wrote decent documentation, took 3 or 4 times as long to write it. Some of those were faster programmers but I always breezed through the documentation. It just came easily to me.

Barry
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