Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well

Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well by sokoloff on Friday May 31, 2019 @11:16AM (#20061666)

“Writing is nature's way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.” ― Leslie Lamport

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Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well by tombert on Friday May 31, 2019 @11:20AM (#20061707)

I love that quote, but Lamport actually says in the Specifying Systems book that he got it from Dick Guindon.

I mention this purely in the interest of pedantry.

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Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well by dmreedy on Friday May 31, 2019 @01:57PM (#20063324)

I had a professor who gave me another favorite quote of mine: "It's worth being pedantic at least twice in your life"

I think the ideas are related.

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Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well by tomfern on Friday May 31, 2019 @01:50PM (#20063264)

I'm stealing that quote, it's so good. I'm always surprised how ideas that sounded wonderful in my head turn into garbage when written down.

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Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well by ithkuil on Friday May 31, 2019 @04:44PM (#20064804)

An actual quote from Lamport: "mathematics is nature's way to show you how lousy your writing is".

It's layered on top of a quote of Guindon he uses in a book about TLA+ in order to make a point for using math to formally specify systems

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Re:Undervalued Engineering Skills: Writing Well by hliyan on Saturday June 01, 2019 @09:18AM (#20069033)

A previous HN discussion on the subject from a decade ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=993253

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