[lbo-talk] Prose Style, was Time to Get Religion

[Tayssir John Gabbour]

On 12/6/06, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
> A chess book using algebraic notation may be a
> fascinating topic of discussion for me and ravi (/Life and games of M.
> Tal /rocks!), but it's just gibberish to people who don't participate in
> the chess culture.  In sum: you can't say a text is "unnecessarily
> obscure" until you participate meaningfully in the culture that created it.

Books on chess theory often seem pretty clear to me. Authors like Mark
Dvoretsky, Nimzowitsch, Kotov, Znosko-Borovsky, etc, write openly, and
I don't even find chess particularly exciting. (I don't have the
interest in memorizing openings or calculating long variations.)

So if you start out reading Nimzowitsch's _My System_, an early
introduction to hypermodern theory, he uses all sorts of metaphors
like, "When a merchant sees his business is not succeeding, he does
well to liquidate it, so as to invest the proceedings in a more
promising one."


> Thus a computer programming text is not clear to
> me at all, but it could be a clear text in the culture of computer
> programmers.

As a programmer, I'm of the opinion that most computer programming
books are pretty bad. video.google.com has talks by Alan Kay
describing the awful, masochistic state of modern computing, talks
which I think you WOULD largely understand. Despite the fact that his
audience is programmers, where he describes parts of our own history
most of us don't even know about.

There is a sort of war going on in programming, with powerful earlier
traditions fighting to return, after having lost in the market.

Tayssir