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Subject:Re: language and communication From:Sandy Harris <sandy -at- storm -dot- ca> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Sat, 25 Nov 2000 23:08:41 -0500
Bruce Byfield wrote:
> Not that non-literate forms of communication should be despised.
> Oral cultures, for example, produce people with extraordinary
> memories, capable (as in archaic Greece) of remembering thousands of
> lines, or of composing them on the fly or (as in early Scandinavia)
> of memorizing dozens of laws and precedents.
I wonder how this relates to this passage from Eric Raymond's
"Portrait of J. Random Hacker":
| Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is
| not the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably
| even more important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and
| reference large amounts of `meaningless' detail, trusting to later
| experience to give it context and meaning. A person of merely average
| analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an effective
| hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself
| outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick
| reference manuals into their brains. [During the production of the
| first book version of this document, for example, I learned most of
| the rather complex typesetting language TeX over about four working
| days, mainly by inhaling Knuth's 477-page manual. My editor's
| flabbergasted reaction to this genuinely surprised me, because years
| of associating with hackers have conditioned me to consider such
| performances routine and to be expected. --ESR]
Perhaps more interesting is to contemplate how this should affect our
writing.
> I remember a late novel
> by Mary Renault in a Greek bard of about 500 BCE laments that his
> student writes things down, because written information can be
> easily corrupted and because he is afraid that his student's memory
> will become uncertain.
Sounds like moderns lamenting use of calculators.
> However, for the types of detailed information that tech writers
> ordinarily deal with, the written word does seem the best medium,
> even though it isn't necessarily the only medium.
In general, yes, but for much technical material tables or various
types of list are better than paragraphs of text, and for some
diagrams are indispensible.
Format follows function?
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