Code and Prose

I had this odd thought last night as I was working on code for class and I remembered something I heard somewhere, I'm not sure if it was at work or school. But the comment was made that code can be written so it's functional but not as efficient or as clean as it could be. After learning more about writing, I realized that prose is the same way. I guess poetry is too.

I can write prose that gets the point across and tells a story but two paragraphs in my reader has fallen asleep or gotten confused. Unless my reader is my daughter who loves everything I write. But good prose, like good code, cleans up the boring parts and has better description to let you know what is going on as the plot/program moves along.

So a software developer is a lot like a novelist, just with a different syntax.

This is the Novel Mage saying *POOF*