NaCoWriMo?

[eichin]

November is National Novel Writing Month, sort of a "group therapy for creative people" where people commit to writing 175-page (50,000 word) novels, from scratch, in one month; they've run for several years, and last year 3500 of the 25000 participants actually finished novels (one of whom has, a few rewrites later, not only been published, but

Comments

[cjsmith]

I like this idea. I think complexity is a far better measure than lines, although it could be argued that number of lines ideally scales with complexity. :-)

I will cheer for you as you code, if you will cheer for me as I write. I'll be doing NaNoWriMo for the second time this year.

[jered]

6000 lines isn't outrageous as long as you have a directed goal.

For example, PermaBEEP (my Java BEEP implementation) was written in about a month, and is somewhere around 25k lines if you include the unit tests. (Perhaps half that if you only count "functional" code.)

This was a huge amount of work, but was eminently possible because I was implementing a library for which one side (the wire protocol) was completely specified. (Well, I did find some ambiguities in the RFCs in the process, but Marshall was very quick to respond.) Without a clear goal I might have written that much code, but not had that much at the end.

I consider myself a skilled developer, but certainly not anything that far out of the ordinary. 25k lines is a big project, so I would put that in the same class as if I were a skilled writer, writing a 1200 page epic. 6k lines seems a fair comparison (within an order of magnitude ) for an average novel.

Wouldn't want to have a day job if I were going to attempt that, though.

Between the lines...

[rjpb]

Is this comparison fair?

I would want to read the actual method of making this estimate, but this comparison seems way off at first glance. A single grammatical error, spelling mistake, or lackluster metaphor in a 50,000-word novel would have no effect on the whole; in a piece of code, such a flaw might make the whole fail completely. I would guess that an equivalent length of code would be well under 1000 lines; the 50k-word novel is intended to be quite short for its genre.

The primary difference is that a novel is declarative thought, whereas a program is executive thought. I would question whether the two are not vastly different.

Re: Between the lines...

[eichin]

Mmm, having 6000 lines of code fail *entirely* due to one error means that it's been built with tools and components that are way too fragile for the task - like building a transmission out of Lego, or something. As for declarative vs. executive, I'm not convinced, but I'll have to think about it some more to articulate why. My original thought was that a novel is more linear and code is more deep-structured, but that has entirely to do with the style of the novel (and somewhat of the code) and I don't think it's inherent.

I also want to emphasize that code is also for *human* readers, not just the machine...

[obra]

I missed this post first time through. I really, really like the idea. Conveniently, I was already planning on doing this. Can I get an exception for already having done a bit of architecture (last week)?

[eichin]

I think the key is to do the *coding* that month - after all, some of the writers have been thinking about the story they're trying to write all their lives, and this is just kicking them over the edge.

[obra]

Also,
Not NaCoWriMo. There's no reason to limit this to one country.

GloCoWriMo.