On Sat, 2015-02-14 at 12:58 -0700, Tom Johnson wrote:
> Some interesting observations by a young journalism developer.
There seem to be some connections between journalism and software
development.
There are uber-hard debugging problems that may have some of the
qualities of investigative journalism. Typically one cannot turn over
every rock, but it helps to turn over a lot of them. It's easy to
become convinced of things that aren't true and stick with bad
hypotheses for too long yet it's also important to tolerate weak
evidence knowing that it is weak. It's important to have good
background knowledge to imagine different ways what happened could have
happened. In some situations it is important to expect that every step
will be a struggle.
On the synthesis side, I think it diverges more. While it can be useful
to make programs `accessible', those that solve harder problems (in my
opinion) have minimal redundancy. One learns how to work with them
because they have a design built in to them and this means use of
compact language throughout. It is not necessarily a good thing to have
programs any random person can hack on without any investment. Yes, it
is easier to get people engaged with programs that do things in obvious
ways, and do obvious things many times, but that does not necessarily
mean the project will move faster. It just means there is a lot of make
work and conspicuous activity. The craft of unpacking a dense
abstraction and system of constraints -- the `essence' -- and explaining
how it came to be and why it is important might be more along the lines
of journalism. Good technical writers have these skills, but they
probably aren't pigeonholed as `just' technical writers if they do.
Marcus
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