No, I can tell my code is good by looking at it. Maybe I just need to write more?
- Paul Buchheit
No one knows Paul, we just need to keep writing. :)
- Jorge Escobar
Honestly, largely it's a lack of standardized metrics. (aka subjectivity)
- Kevin Fox
...code is written to do something that can be observed, measured, tested. Writing, unless it's notes for yourself, is supposed to communicate to other people, and there's no way to really know if they got what you meant until they read it...
- .LAG liked that
No error messages? There's grammatical and spelling ones...but we need secret robot farms with high IQs to tell us if something is good or not
- Itachi
Most professional writers do a lot of drafts. It's good on your first draft to leave out the editing principle in your head, and just write in a stream of consciousness way, or in other words just write what comes to your mind first without editing it. They call that the "lyrical" factor. Then after that first draft you can bring in the editing factor to clean it up. But on another note, FriendFeed is the smoothest running web app on the internet. How'd you do that? :-)
- Stephen Pickering
Relative amounts of time spent crafting each one?
- Bill Moorier
Because, you're a coder/engineer. Eloquence in one language doesn't translate to another :)
- Mo Kargas
"In praise of the maxim.— A good maxim is too hard for the teeth of time and whole millennia cannot consume it, even though it serves to nourish every age: it is thus the great paradox of literature, the imperishable in the midst of change, the food that is always in season, like salt—though, unlike salt, it never loses its savor." -- Nietzsche, "Human, All Too Human," 168
- barce
I think because it's a lot easier to measure (or, with your experience, to guess the measurement) of the performance and efficiency of code than the performance and efficiency of writing. English, spoken word, essays, books -- it's a more variegated language. Its features are less crisp, more nebulous. In 2009, we assume the function and performance of writing is such that it makes one...
more...
- tom harada
I've also never understood how salt loses its savor. That never happens to my salt, and chemically I can't imagine what would do that.
- Paul Buchheit
the writing was good... at least if you're talking about the post I think you're talking about.
- Jim: Dead Like FF
How your code will be executed is well-defined. If it's concise and executes correctly, it's good. Prose is harder. Sometimes you should repeat yourself; sometimes you shouldn't. The effect of a phrase varies from person to person.
- Bruce Lewis
When I get a vision in my head for some code, I often can write something that reads as nicely as that vision. When I get a vision in my head for an essay, what I end up writing rarely reads as nicely, even to my own eyes, as what I had imagined.
- Bruce Lewis
I bet you can find writers that say just the opposite
- Jesse Stay
Because your writing software doesn't give you warnings or errors when you type something crappy. (Imagine what the internet would be like if blogging software did!)
- April Russo (app103)
Microsoft Word with a compiler, type checking and intellisense. Very good April, very good.
- Roberto Bonini
from iPhone
I think you - like many - haven't seen enough writing you really like, and consciously so. Try to watch for articles/essays that really resonate with you, and look at the form, not just the message. I agree with others here that producing good writing will probably take lots of revisions, just like many coders refactor (or should I say "tweak") their code endlessly, if only the method names, order of variables, the way error/exception handling are structured, etc.
- Meryn Stol
On a side note, one of my favorite FriendFeed features is the ability to "tweak" my comments after I posted them. I'm rarely satisfied with my first draft of a paragraph-length comment. Secret to good code and to good writing is having a very demanding internal critic.
- Meryn Stol
Good writers *know* when the right words are in the right places. Writing is much more like music than programming -- an intuitive sense of elegant balance among elements which sustains an easy flow of forward energy towards a point or revelation.
- Sean McBride
It's the same thing when you throw a paper ball into a trash can, you know as soon as you let go whether it's going to go in or not. :P
- Evan Travers
Good writing is good more because of its good style rather than its underlying propositional content. Programs are the opposite. Code has a lot of style, but propositional content rules, which is easier to appreciate. Writing is much more style, so writing has many more possible combinations that can express an intention, which means there are many more ways of doing it wrong, and it's hard to find the right way.
- Todd Hoff
Good writing has a cadence and flow that is easier to feel verbally than on paper (for me, anyway). Read what you've written out loud: if your voice gains confidence/speed as you go, totally immersed in the words (in the rhetorical style of Barack Obama), you're done. If instead you stop and restart, looping back on yourself, with the words calling attention to how they don't quite fit (in the rhetorical style of George Bush), you're not done yet. After a few tries out loud you'll find a better phrasing.
- Lexi Baugher
Jonathan Swift on style: "Proper words in proper places."
- Sean McBride
"Swift's style is, in its line, perfect; the manner is a complete expression of the matter, the terms appropriate, and the artifice concealed. It is simplicity in the true sense of the word." (Samuel Coleridge, "Lecture on Style," 1818)
- Sean McBride
"Why homepages becomes a Las Vegas visual experience Incrementally-developed UIs that are never refactored often turn into a Las Vegas visual experience over time. Ya know, something that looks like this:"
- arunthampi
from Bookmarklet
I like this line: "Yet it’s often hard to reorganize the whole site, especially if it means taking a short-term dip on traffic, so the “safe” thing to do becomes to incrementally add things until the user experience is horrible..".
- Winston Teo
International growth has started to completely dominate on FriendFeed since August. Below is an unlabeled graph of page views on FriendFeed this month, broken down by country. Guess which country is the largest green slice below? (Hint: it is not English-speaking)
where other is proxied users from Iran. ;)
- EricaJoy
If we were not blocked , we would win a big slice for iran :(
- Milad.p
from FreshFeed
Both China and Iran would have been in there if they were not both blocked currently
- Bret Taylor
Is Russia any of the other slices pictured above? (other than gray)
- Itachi
That's where Australia is, in the grey :)
- Glenn Slaven
OMG. Friendfeed is going the way of Orkut ;) Btw, is Norway/Scandinavia even visible in all this ? Just curious.
- Thomas Bøhm
@thomas. even though Orkut is Turkish (the guy), it is (site) not big in Turkey.
- Ozgur Demir
i'm sure finland is forbidden long time ago from this list ;)
- Nia
from fftogo
Just look at the public feed for 2 secs or 2 hours - yep, definitely.
- Micah Wittman
from iPhone
Facebook has a very similar story as far as I know.. we are a communicative nation:)
- Neşe Uyanık
Who's Gray? It's Gray, Louis of course :)
- Micah Wittman
Thank you for sharing this graph, Bret.
- Micah Wittman
Interesting - though for the sake of data visualization, pie charts are the worst of all.... :)
- See-ming Lee 李思明 SML
See-ming, a-hem, take a look at your avatar ;)
- Micah Wittman
@Bret, what is the exact number of Turkish people on FF?
- Ozkan Altuner
Ozkan, I'd be curious to know too, but I have a feeling there's an internal policy about not releasing absolute numbers, hence the percentages. But it never hurts to ask :)
- Micah Wittman
@Micah, it's the page view, however, not the number of users :)
- Ozkan Altuner
Good point, Ozkan. But I can't remember Visitor or View counts ever publicly reported before. But today could be the first time! :)
- Micah Wittman
I'm not surprised that Turkey is the green portion. I've seen more and more Turkish posts in my home feed. I thought it was just a biased sample, but perhaps not.
- John (a.k.a. dendroica)
Intense competition between Iran and Turkey occurred :D
- Nimaa
Hmmmmmmmmmmm...MOZAMBIQUE luminous orange l guess
- Pam Gwenzi
the desire to push the boundaries of internet of the turkish is troubling. the possesive tendecies of the turkish can be observed in the currently popular ''ff bu deYil'' (this is not ff) comment. turks are crowding ff, westerners are in panic!
- ferayebend
international growth dominates FF and yet the USA dominates the world. Not always in good ways either. What is the link? I don't think there is one. All I can say is that I love the USA and I love FriendFeed. What does it all mean? More free, cold beer is needed to find the answers.
- Morgan Haley
.. because, Turkish Facebook users are 10-20 years old. FF is very good alternative for older users. (and in addition Twitter is non-useful)
- Murat Tatar
If that is so, can we get some way of filtering by language? I want to follow more international people but be able to ignore them or their friends when they post in what I cannot read :)
- Joelle Nebbe (iphigenie)
An early birthday present: The Gmail Javascript compiler was just open-sourced! http://code.google.com/closure... (it compiles JS into smaller, faster JS)
Unfortunately it looks like the internationalization features may be missing. I wonder why those were removed? (or if I'm just not seeing it)
- Paul Buchheit
@Paul the Closure project has three components: compiler, library, and template language. Looks like the Closure/library might be competing with jQuery.
- Shakeel Mahate
I think jQuery does a lot of stuff that might confuse the compiler, e.g. iterating over an array of string function names and creating new function wrappers (look at the way the parent/child/next/prev/etc functions get installed) The Closure library is also full of type annotations that help the compiler make better optimization choices, so you're likely to get a better compiled outcome using Closure than jQuery + fixes + compiler
- Ray Cromwell
@paul -- I know you've been wanting this opensourced for a long time. sorry it took such a long time. Nick Santos and the jscompiler team has finally done it! Cheers!
- Jing Lim
Congratulations to the team (and @Paul & Jing) -- I know everyone's been waiting a long time for this. For anyone considering whether to use jQuery vs Closure, consider that they're meant for largely different purposes. jQuery's good for enhancing static web pages; Closure's much better at building large apps. And as Ray points out above, Closure the library is going to get much better results from Closure the compiler than an arbitrary js library would, because of all the type annotations.
- Joel Webber
Paul Buchheit has been at the top of my best of pages all month. Rock on, Paul.
- Donald C. Lindsay
Hey HAPPY BIRTHDAY PAUL !!! Cool present!! <insert CAKE> :D
- Susan Beebe
That writeup is trolling for traffic IMHO. Nit picking 50 lines out of 200+ thousand (written for readability, which get compiled and optimized), providing no benchmarks for claims, and spending half the time bashing Java, it just seems to be struggling to find something wrong with Closure.
- Ray Cromwell
Sachin: he seems to be commenting on Closure the JS library, not Closure the JS compiler (that Paul's post was about). And he may be a douchebag, but I haven't seen anything I disagree with.
- Gabe
@Sachin: I hate to be too harsh, but that post is pretty much garbage. From what I can tell he's pretty much managed to enumerate some of the worst things about Javascript -- nitpicking the code for referencing "undefined" directly without declaring it as an uninitialized local? That's insane. Following this advice is mostly a recipe for an unreadable mess. Also, look in the comments for several refutations of the idea that some of these are even optimizations.
- Joel Webber
Joel, you're just not man enough to handle a language where 'top' is an implicitly reserved keyword, and 'undefined' which should be, isn't. But it could be worse, 'null' could be something you could override. :)
- Ray Cromwell
"Apple wins because the guy who cares the most about user experience happens to run the show. And last I checked, humble wasn’t really a word you could use to describe him."
- arunthampi
from Bookmarklet
Idea for a useful webapp: A tool for doing web page mockups that's better than Photoshop because things actually look right (because it's rendered by the browser). It doesn't need to generate good html, so absolute positioning, etc is ok.
Totally brilliant idea. I write my own bad html mockups in a text editor or whatever IDE I'm playing with at the time, but a tool to ease this process would mean I could get on to abandoning the half-finished project much sooner than usual. :-)
- Slappy Line
Please god no, don't create another "doesn't need to generate good html" code generator. srsly
- Jason Wehmhoener
Well, as for the mockups, there is really great Firefox extension called Pencil. You should try it.
- Mladen Srdić
using Cappuccino, an open source framework that makes it easy to build desktop-caliber applications that run in a web browser?
- huixing
Paul, have you checked out Axure http://www.axure.com/? I've typically used Visio or resorted to whiteboards/paper as they are easier to edit.
- Jauder Ho
Jason, I would be fine with it not generating html at all. As for Balsamiq and some of the others, the idea is actually that it would look more like the final product instead of less. Photoshop gets fonts wrong and stuff because it isn't a web browser, and yet people still keep using it, so it seems that it must have some advantage over the other tools.
- Paul Buchheit
Photoshop has two major advantages, multiple uses and precision. Photoshop can be used for more than just web mockups. One person can achieve multiple goals with Photoshop while a mockup tool just makes mockups. The second advantage is the mockups look great in presentations because the author has complete control. Photoshop mockups aren't real they're hyper-real.
- Kevin D. White
Depends whether your goal is to sketch and idea or create a final design. For the latter, you really do want it to be pixel perfect. For the former, you want a "wireframe" or whatever the cool kids call it these days.
- ⓞnor
What ⓞnor said. For "wireframes" a whiteboard is fine, but eventually you want pixel-perfect designs.
- Paul Buchheit
Paul have you tried Fireworks, that's what our designers use.
- Michael
http://www.balsamiq.com I got this link from Cooper U boards a while back, and a lot of my co-workers have found it very useful. While it's not pixel perfect, it allows for really quick mock ups with the idea that the design of the end product will be done by actual designers.
- Sam Ee
I've been looking for something like this for years. Balsamiq is definitely a good start, but I feel like there's not quite enough depth yet. Has anyone had luck with stencils like the ones found at http://graffletopia.com/ (for Omni Graffle)?
- Sutee Dee
pixel perfect? The web isn't print. Complete control over the rendering environment is an illusion. Don't submit to it!
- Andy Bakun
Vi is pretty good. You just write some text and point a browser at it.
- Cliff Gerrish
Try wireframing and prototyping apps - I am not sure if output is rendered at browser level though. Protoshare.com, jumpchart.com, productplanner.com
- TrafficBug