Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace

"Similarly, it’s easy to look at a sentence or a paragraph and to say that it doesn’t make sense or is badly written. This book gave me the tools to analyze a text and identify the reasons why it doesn’t work, for example stating the topic of a paragraph only in the middle of it. I found it very useful to consciously analyze my own writing. That’s important with programming, because obviously you’re communicating with a computer, but more importantly you’re communicating with other humans. And humans are much harder to work with, because you can’t write unit tests to check their understanding. And even if you’re the only programmer working on a particular project, you’re actually always collaborating with future-you; and past-you doesn’t respond to emails. “Writing well and describing things well is very valuable to a good programmer, and even more to a data scientist” Knowing how to write clearly helps you to write code clearly, and also helps you writing good documentation and explain the intent of what you’re doing. Even very good code will only ever tell you how something has been implemented; it won’t tell you why a particular technique has been chosen. Writing well and describing things well is very valuable to a good programmer, and even more to a data scientist. It doesn’t matter how wonderful your data analysis is, if you can’t explain to somebody else what you’ve done, why it makes sense, and what to take away from it. Partly because of another book that nearly made it onto my list: Domain-Specific Languages by Martin Fowler. It talks about the idea of writing a small language inside another language, to express ideas in a specific domain, and the idea of ‘fluent’ interfaces, that you can read and write as if they were human language. There have actually been attempts, for example by Apple, to write programming languages that were exactly like human language, which I think is a mistake because human language is terribly inefficient, and relies on things like tone and body language to clarify ambiguity. But thinking about how you can make a computer language as similar as possible to a human language is important. It can take simple forms, like thinking of functions as verbs, and objects as nouns, so you can draw on the grammatical intuition that comes from human language. Another thing I’ve been exploring lately is the question of foreign languages. The tidyverse gives you access to all of these verbs, but they’re all in English. Should we have translations of the tidyverse? Could we have a Spanish tidyverse, with Spanish equivalents of the verbs? Of course it raises many problems, the biggest one being that 75% of the resources available on sites like StackOverflow are in English, so the answers wouldn’t be universal anymore. But that’s an interesting area where we’re running small experiments; there’s a group of Spanish speakers working on a translation of the R for Data Science book, which includes translating some of the datasets that are used in it. I’m very interested to see where that goes, and how useful it can be to aspiring data scientists everywhere, especially when R is quickly democratizing access to the subject, well beyond the academic world."