For 30+ years, I wrote computer code rather than writing books. I don’t regret much in this life, but I can’t help but wonder where my writing might have gone if I hadn’t stopped working on Members of the Cast in 1977. (Work on the novel resumed in 2015, and MOTC was published in 2021.) During those “lost years,” I designed and programmed “The Pretty Good Grading Program.” I’am proud of the accomplishment and know PGGP saved elementary teachers a zillion hours.
When I began writing PGGP, my brother-in-law gave me a book about computer programming. For the life of me, I cannot remember the title. It well may have been a book by Gerald Weinberg. One takeaway was that if you can write ten lines of code per day, you are doing well.
Ten lines of code per day hit me like a gob of mud in the face. There were days I wrote code like mad. Unfortunately, there were days of debugging a piece of code, perhaps one line of errant code. Anyone can write a bunch of computer code. The question is, how much viable code can you write?
I have said that I spend 10% of my writing time writing and 90% revising/editing. I see a parallel. Anyone can write 1000 words a day, but are the lines viable? I am the first to admit that the problem with computer coding and book writing may be me. Perhaps I am not smart enough to keep the entire project’s facets in mind as I write each line.
In my search for the book I read 40 years ago, I found The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming, originally established in Jerry Weinberg’s book The Psychology of Computer Programming.
The Ten rules are good advice for computer coders and book writers. Take a look at The Ten Commandments of Egoless Programming. You will learn valuable code and book writing lessons. Or, you can throw rocks at the ideas.
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