I have two: Write Right, mentioned at the link, and Reading like a Writer. Both are about writing more generally, but good writing is always succinct writing in the sense that no words are wasted and concepts are conveyed with as much brevity as possible — and no more.

It wasn’t supposed to be general advice for programming, simply how I apply the principles to my work and projects.

The irony of such ambiguity isn’t lost on me.

I should refactor the article ;-)

[)amien

We’ve talked about before, I think this only works with development that is mostly consumed internally, or you have a very close relationship with your consumers. Any library with a large number of external users is inherently going to need more flexibility built in, because there is a minimum cycle for ‘major’ (ie feature / structure altering) releases. You can’t work individually with all of them to determine the minimum set, and you can’t refactor every other week (for external consumption anyway); you have to predict / extrapolate their requirements to some degree in order to make sure they don’t hit a brick wall that can’t be solved without a refactoring. So I think a reactive approach doesn’t work in all cases.

I guess this comes down to the definition of ‘what is required’ though. Libraries with more diverse users need more stability, which means more up-front design.

In writing in general though I think the most important thing is to be enjoyable to read. Tech books which concentrate just on delivering the subject matter as succinctly as possible are most often very dry – fine as a reference, but when it comes to an enjoyable read, some padding with anecdotes and asides can make all the difference. My favourite is Scott Meyers – he’s able to tackle incredibly geeky C idiosyncracies and make it feel like entertainment. So I wouldn’t say brevity is king. But then I’m not often brief outside of a source code editor ;)

The post title should have also been six words in length.

[)amien

Sorry to nitpick but should it be losing important information instead of loosing important information?

Thanks lazycoder via Twitter.

[)amien