Snippets of speech
I've just watched an interview by Quanta Magazine with Leslie Lamport, the Computer Scientist, titled The Man Who Revolutionized Computer Science With Math [link to Youtube] Youtube kept shoving the video's thumbnail into my face so I said, “Stop it already ok ok I'll watch it.” Leslie Lamport said, “Coding is to programming what typing is to writing.” Well, before I spend a whole lot of time paraphrasing let me just copy-paste a snippet of the transcript (spoken in a rather dramatic voice):
1:25 Writing is something that involves 1:26 mental effort. You're thinking about what 1:28 you're going to say. The words have some 1:30 importance but in some sense even 1:32 they are secondary to the ideas. 1:35 In the same way programs are built on 1:38 ideas. They have to do something. And what 1:41 they're supposed to do, I mean it's like 1:43 what writing is supposed to convey. 1:46 If people are trying to learn 1:48 programming by being taught to code… well, 1:51 they're being taught writing by being 1:54 taught how to type. And that doesn't make 1:56 much sense.
So I wonder, “Could something similar be said about movement?” Typing is to writing, what movement is to …? dot dot dot? And… should I place movement into the spot of typing or writing?
Quanta Magazine's Youtube video is a great viral video, and works really well as such. However, from my point of view, as a writer, my definition of writing would be very different from his, if I gave one. Does writing really involve mental effort? Is a writer really thinking about what he is going to say? Is the purpose of writing really just to convey ideas? For example, when I google for “Writing saved my life,” I get about 1,390,000,000 results. What's going on here? And how would this compare to movement? What is movement?