Coding and Narrative
Slashdot readers compiled and collaboratively rated questions for Neal Stephenson.
Here are his responses. As you might expect, it was completely unsurprising: way smart + majorly witty.
still program, but I tend to do it as a diversion from writing, and so there is little crossover between it and fiction writing. Modern programming is hairy and difficult for me to get a grip on. This is because (1) there is so much user interface code, which kind of makes my eyes glaze over, and (2) GNU type code is crammed with macros, compiler directives and switches that make it very difficult for me to read the source files. Lately my platform of choice has been Mathematica, which is expensive (compared to gcc) but makes it easy to do anything with a few lines of code. Mathematica makes it easy to do proper documentation, in that you can mix narrative material freely with executable statements.
Posted by johndan at October 20, 2004 09:26 PM
| TrackBack