So I was watching a “No Boilerplate” video the other day, when I noticed an interesting phrase: “the eyeball’s compiler”. “Hmm”, I thought, “Wouldn’t that be the brain then?” That spiralled into a thinking session that eventually arrived to the main thesis of this essay: Writing code and writing essays are remarkably similar, because they both involve the brain: the compiler of ideas.
To start, let’s begin with how I write essays in the first place. To be honest, “writing essays” is kind of easy. It’s the ideas that are always the issue. But when I’m writing an essay, I already have a general overview of how I’m going to write the essay, whether it’s by creating an outline, having several notes that inspired the essay, or just by having my brain compiler spit out a brainworm that I couldn’t leave alone. When I’m writing an essay, the blank page does not scare me, because my mind already has ideas that I am translating into text.
This is actually pretty similar to writing code. When writing code, I tend to have a pretty good idea of what the code is going to do. The challenge involves getting the damn thing to run. In other words, what my brain and fingers do is translate the ideas in my mind into code that the computer accepts.
These two share one similar thing: the translation of ideas to reality. They both have their own syntax and style guides, but at their core it’s about the externalization of ideas. Therefore, the mind acts as a compiler of many differing ideas, merging them together in order to form coherency.
Of course, no compiler is perfect. Mine certainly isn’t. That’s why we have editing/debugging. These two share a similarity: correcting errors that occurred in the translation from idea to reality. For debugging, you get a very clear indication as to if an error exists: It’ll literally spit it at you. For editing, however, you need to have a sense of what you want in an essay. It’s trained into you, as you continue to write and write. Through editing, you aren’t just editing your essay, you’re refining your mind compiler to lessen the chance of any similiar translation errors from happening. In fact, this also happens in debugging as well. Eventually, as you continue in your coding journey, you start developing a sixth sense with your code. “Ah, this has a syntax error”, or “Whoops, wrong function”. In short, editing helps refine your mind, so that you make less mistakes the next time.
Another way programming and writing are similar have to do with structures. The way you structure your code often determines how the code runs. The differing paradigms of programming all have different views on how to write code, and as such you decide how that changes what you write. (NOTE: this may be slightly inaccurate. I’m still unsure as to how deep a paradigm is meant to go. For the purposes of this essay though I’m interpreting it as “use the paradigm for the job”). Same way in essays, really. For one paragraph I may use a more narrative writing style, for another I may favor argumentive. Here too, you kinda just have to write in order to develop your senses. Pick the right style for you, and you’ll do much better.
To conclude, let’s end off with refining the mind compiler. In many ways, a lot of us work with ideas, whether it’s for writing, programming, accounting, or something else entirely. It becomes important for us to refine our mind, as doing that allows us to become better at the things we do. More importantly, it shows us how we think, how we view a problem, what favored solutions we may have. For instance, if you’ve read any other of my essays, you may notice that when I begin the body of the essay, I tend to start with overviews of things that I’m talking about. It’s what works for me, and I like it. The key goal here is to do it, repetitively, until you find what works for you.
Ideas are where action is born from. I pray that you may always execute your ideas into
reality.