Coders and Writers

I know very few good coders that are also good writers. While the best writers are not expected to write any code at all, the average-to-good coders are all expected to communicate at least a little. Being not able to write well can be a limitation. Whether you're running a start-up or communicating with your management, writing well cannot hurt.

Having been a coder and having had decent verbal skills, I often feel that the trouble with coding is that it is too different from conventional thinking. The way coders have to think everyday, makes them worry about details quite a lot. This often discourages you from "connecting" with your audience.

A writer, on the other hand, always connects with his audience. In journalism, history or fiction, writers go in the field, research information and communicate the essence to their authors. That is a full-time job. The job of a programmer is very different. He questions every finding in the field and then when he is done, he abstracts the logical details as far as necessary from its audience. Connecting with the audience is never required of him.

Having a high-level idea - which his intuition may encourage - also works against the art of the programmer. So he often ends up discouraging the intuitive process as well. Having structural design of a solution is a skill used by management but it is never enough for a coder - for whom almost everything requires getting down to the nitty-gritty. A friend of mine, while explaining to me how much of debugging does his real life is about, used to say that if you're a believer of "de minimis non curat praetor"  (king doesn't care about minor details) - make sure you stay away from programming.

It may sound ironical - when you observe that linguistics is the best place to study logic (language is where Lewis Caroll started study of logic with), it seems surprising that coders and writers have gone completely separate ways. Despite the historic appeal of coding to the logician - even the writers who would write about logic hardly benefit form a "coding" mindset in their art.

This brings about a certain "social" separation between coders and writers. As a teenager, I myself was inspired by writings of Bertrand Russell. It impressed me how well he could write. Clearly, his writings weren't appreciated by everyone. While students of logic loved him so much, Yeats himself had once called him stupid (ironically while explaining the importance of teaching mathematics to kids).

I know that Bertrand Russell must, seeing that he is such a featherhead, be wrong about everything, but as I have no mathematics I cannot prove it.
Source: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=4392


That a separation exists between coders and writers in our society is not an exaggeration and doesn't need more evidence. I think the reason lies in the very lack of a need of audience by the programmer. Lack of a need of audience is both the strength of the programmer's art and his severest limitation.Not needing an audience destroys the need to write.

I clearly remember, that as a teenager, I was inspired particularly by logic and mathematics and ended up having little regard for poetry for example. Yeats,Keats or Coleridge, despite their appeal to me as kids, seemed all the same in my teens. Writing a novel of size of War-And-Peace or Lord-of-the-rings seemed nearly impossible, even a grand waste of time sometimes.

The next ten years showed me how little my experience of the world had been because of this disconnection. I think I was only starting to understand what Wittgenstein had meant by saying - "The limits of logic are the limits of my world". The language of logic is all that mattered to me at that time - and yet there were people - my family, friends and women I was attracted to - who had no connection with logic whatsoever.

For a long time, still, my perspective was formed by evaluating everything logically. The need to be loved - was to do with reproduction and the need to socialize was to do with mobility. Too soon I felt I wasn't doing anything I truly enjoyed - or rather I wasn't enjoying anything I was doing. This didn't happen because I was tired of pretending but because I didn't know what my true feelings were any more. The need of feeling was precluded by the need to reason. Yet at the same time, I had several irrational propensities - a desire to learn new languages, an inexplicable liking for cinema, eat out, cook and read history. These activities weren't entirely logical, nor male entirely. I was doing them because I liked them.

As I started reading what I loved, the problem that I soon had was that I wasn't able to compose what I loved reading. Coding never posed a similar problem to me. When I was coding - I always came out as a conqueror - strong, robust and resilient. On the other hand, I would sound extremely miserable when I wrote. In my writing, the memories of past and dreams of future were driven inexplicably by a world of battles, famines and sorrow (thankfully I didn't read too much science fiction). While I was able to feel a lot more than that, what I wrote was just terribly and narrowly associated with search for causality.

It took me years to realize that the way we think is easily detectable from the way we write. The reason why most programmers I know can't write well is that they actually don't like writing. A certain level of stoicism helps a mathematician and a coder - but it's not a trustworthy friend of a writer. If you want to organize your thoughts, like many programmers do, it does help to question the thoughts and express what you truly mean. But a writer needs to connect with the audience and for that he needs to offer far more than the skepticism to his audience. I don't believe that programmers can't write. What I do believe is that they must write differently - and attempt to put their heart and soul into it - not just minds.

Long before he became a nobel laureate in literature, J. M. Coetzee used to be a programmer at IBM - something he wrote about in his work Youth in 2002. He did talk about being miserable in London - for reasons similar to what I had when I was in New York. Even though you do not want to become a full-timer writer or publish in literary criticism journals, you can certainly write as a coder if you want to. When someone trained in Applied Mathematics can win a nobel prize in literature, a lot of trained programmers could definitely get that sales pitch working. The separation I often see between coders and writers in the industry is really unnecessary.

My special case

There is an overwhelming sense of being special when you are an Indian man living abroad. Those who grew up in India bear the identity of a colonial people. As kids we were meant to feel through TV and books ( which mattered more when there was no internet ) that the British had conquered India over past centuries, had enslaved its people and ruled by dividing them into factions. An Indian man often lives with an immense sense of responsibility to revive this old, golden past - which was momentarily manipulated for empire-building interests.

In doing so, he has a difficult task - to connect the two disparate worlds - one where there was no English influence and one where there is nothing but English ideas.

Such a conflict thankfully hasn't resulted in civil wars in India as yet. There are two reasons for it - one is modernity which is liked by Indians and the second is that despite the nationalist spirit of colonial struggles, the migration of the Anglophile elite to the West was not as massive and the old colonial structure was retained as such (particularly so if you believe Perry Anderson - who rightly points out that 70% of Indian constitution is Govt. of India act from 1935).

There was in fact a lost paradise with the departure of British. The connection of the modern world with the native was broken and what was left to Indians was this new uncertain world - a world  probably as uncertain to the West.  Here, all of a sudden there was no foreign rule, no unanimous ruler was possible. The memories of having been "divided" persisted and the confidence to rule, invent or lead still required approval from foreigners. The English language, culture and institutions were to remain of importance - because shunning it completely would imply turning away from modernity.

The ambiguous connection of the Indian mind with the British is therefore born of the necessary evil of a loss. The attachment with English rule amidst India's elites was not shaken off after India achieved its independence from the empire - thus despite all the nationalist propaganda, the attachment with things English among Indians remained as a private music amongst many.
 
When an Indian travels abroad, he often doesn't know that the "fact" about past riches of India - taught in Indians schools is completely unknown to the West. India, was always a country ridden with caste and poverty, it is widely assumed. The private music is therefore secluded even further - since the memories of colonial rule in West aren't of cooperation or education, but really of armies and subjugation.

This continued obsession with power in the West - often presents Indians abroad with only two choices - one is to completely reject the delusions of the past and avoid issues which their schizophrenic attachment with India's past can bring. The other choice, is to completely embrace this private music and start viewing English influence itself as one of the many traditions of India. These choices are just a restatement of the already present conflict amongst Indians.

I myself have gravitated towards the latter choice - not for any other reason than my commitments to my family. For me to completely reject the attachment with India would mean rejecting my Indian family - who is subject to the very propaganda and ignorance that I complain about. The choice to embrace humanity over nationality is far easier for me than many others I know.

I think it is important to see the condition of immigrants in this light - since it explains the issues with national origin in the West. Being from a non-Western world prevents you from becoming a good soldier - and hence an ideal citizen of the country. Historically, loyalty to the kings is where ideas of nationality come from. So in the post-colonial world, I believe, no amount of integration or education can make every human within a certain boundary the part of a nation that is believed in by the majority. The nation itself often compromises its historical definitions to assimilate the new entrants.

The dilemma, which the Indian faces, is thus not a unique condition of post-colonials. Regardless of where we come from, we all face the  dilemma-  whether our notions of humanity can be superseded by the notions of nationality. Many of us make up their minds but others either avoid the question or end up choosing humanity over nationality.

The choice is false one, in my opinion. Outside of the world of armies and football teams, what difference does nationality make anyway? Besides what kind of a country is it where you have to compromise on values of humanity? India, UK or US - where I have lived so far, don't ask you this question directly. You read about certain radical view-points in the news, run into flag-bearers when there is football or cricket match and get back to life as usual. No one, thankfully, has ever imposed a certain agenda on me except through bad writing.

The conflict itself is therefore a continued state of existence. The special case of Indians, which requires a rather false belief in India's glorious past, is actually a projection of its difficult present. In reality, belief in a golden past is hardly a special case for Indians - only a sign of modernity that creates a conflict between power and equality, between hierarchy and humanity.

Cultural Gaps

What we know as cultural gap between East and West has been engineered through colonialism. It is through the colonial experience that the image of a pure, traditional, forgiving and often meek - Indian man has been engineered - an image that modern Indian male and the freed female has forsaken. Sociologists and post-colonial writers point out that the institutions which attributed softer qualities to female had worked in a similar fashion in colonies to objectify and celebrate the attributes in a whole "race" of people.

It is evident from history that the "cultural" gap wasn't as wide in the more fluid history of the 17th and 18th centuries. This was a time when East India company officials could have Indians wives and the lashkars from Western India could settle at English ports with British wives. I highly doubt that James Brooke was concerned about sending his kids to Oxbridge when he became the maharajah of Sarawak. But as we all know, the communication technologies and transportation improved by a lot in the 19th century. As East became more and more deprived, the preferences transformed. The discrimination could easily prosper when East couldn't offer any resistance - either cultural nor political - to colonialism.

The cultural gap which we talk to this day is actually not about culture at all. This talked about gap is largely determined by the perceptions of backwardness which have survived from 19th century. People in both East and West suffer with this prejudice. The right wing in the West cannot shun the idea of having imparted civilization to the East and the right wing of East cannot get over the perceived humiliation of the past. I don't see this as a cultural difference, it's only an error that needs to be corrected. In 18th century, Westerners would travel to India and delve into its literature without necessarily proving it as inferior - much the Easterners enjoyed learning the sciences without shunning their past identities or traditions. Both activities seem implausible in the modern culture as well as in the 19th century. The cultural gap which we live with was created for empire-building purposes and if that need is over, the talk of cultural gap seems unnecessary. The need is probably to stress upon what's good amongst each other without holding anyone accountable for mess-ups of our past generations.

Poets and Readers

When I was a child, I was surrounded by those who talked of national poets. Pushkin was a big name. Nirala and Dinkar were big names. So were Wordsworth, Milton and Yeats. But nobody ever quite crossed the mark which was set by Tagore. Tagore was the man. He did things that nobody had foreseen. His literature was vast. His works alone meant more than all of Hindi literature combined - his literature so great that even the English swore by it.

Yet there were very few who had read what he wrote. The exhortations to walk alone were sung on TV and his poems on national pride were engraved or sung as anthems. They imparted a sense of comfort and continuity when I read them transcribed, engraved on marble in a script I could read. But that mythical and feminine country of his pride, was a lot less mythical than those who swore by his name. In their minds and speech, he was of an order so tall that it precluded most of us from reading him. Understanding him was nearly impossible.

When I grew up, the hypocrisy had given in and soon died along with communism. We cried for the sad end of a comrade in a battle for the poor. The poets were no more relevant in the new world. Dinkar-Nirala, Yeats-Keats became things for the feeble-minded - unproductive lovers of literature who couldn't feed themselves. The biographies of CEOs made more sense now. Everyone wanted to be them. Unread by most, Tagore's name licked the dust of time. Those other poets not as great as him slowly passed out of memory as well.

Where are the poets now? Who writes and who reads? Are we up for revival again or can we descend into chaos much worse than ours? For Tagore to live or relive, I wish we could just read like he did. Reading any poetry could do perhaps - of any language or any race. Let's never claim anyone's greatness without reading him.

Reminiscing Social Psychology

Whenever I feel the lack of criticism and reflection among Indians, I find myself relishing the writings of Ashis Nandy and Pankaj Mishra. The two writers, Ashis Nandy in particular, seem to retain the social psychological framework that the pre-independence India had developed under the British rule. To both of these writers, much similar to the likes of R. Tagore, it is impossible to view the colonial experience as one of master vs slave or white vs black. Though what Marxism and Gandhism did was to create a British strawman to attribute India's social problems to, these writers attempt to delineate the problems in Indian psyche while history continued in the British times.

The so called struggle for independence was not of any critical importance to Indians until the 1920s when the economic problems started to appear in the empire. Indians had assimilated or rather internalized the violence which Western troops and discriminatory rule had unleashed to them. In the early 20th century, the Indian elites, Bengalis in particular, felt part of the British literary and intellectual tradition and were eager to contribute to it. Their feelings towards the empire were not of hatred but rather of awe.

Ashis Nandy, in his essay titled "The Savage Freud", describes an Indian psychologist named Girindrasekhar Bose, who corresponded with Freud over a period of twenty years and attempted to explain Oedipal theories in the Indian context. A modern interpretation of these writing shows Indian mind under the colonial rule in great detail. More than anything though, it shows the discontinuities of modern India. In Bose's mind or that of other Indian scientists (some of them Nobel laureates) there was no disconnection between puranic fables and modern science. The Marxist ideals that became vogue in India had no space for superstition. Rationality had to shun tradition much the way it did in the West. This particular aspect seems rather un-Indian but the modern India chose to adopt a Western style nationalism over traditional framework which the early 20th century Indian intellectuals were working on. The conflict with tradition however, still continues in India, much the way it does in the rural hinterlands of the West.

After independence, the Bengali elites were to feel the wrath of the general public. However, the incomplete revolution of India granted them sufficient privileges in the post-independence India - often allowing them to study and move abroad and continue with life as they had envisioned.
The social problems in India therefore largely remain untouched. What British established in India might have had some benign consequences as far as rise of a middle class was concerned. But apart from a microscopic elite, this class was not as big to have created an major impact on Indian society. The Nehruvian class that developed in the post-independence world took Marxism and nationalism far more seriously than inane Hindu stories - often committing the same prejudice against Indian frame of mind that the colonial masters were once blamed for.

Understanding of social problems and their historical roots seems a rather unknown institution in India of today. The elites which commented on India have long departed and what flourishes in India in name of social institutions, much like in all parts of world affected by post-war instabilities, are a conglomerate of institutions that track the US. The past is too unknowable and the present requires imitations of the West. For the most part, India still depends on Western commentary for its own self-image.