The Difference Between Writing and Programming

James Somers is Jane Street’s writer-in-residence, splitting his time between English and OCaml, and helping to push forward all sorts of efforts around knowledge-sharing at Jane Street. In this episode, James and Ron talk about the role of technical writing in an organization like Jane Street, and how engineering software relates to editing prose.

You can find the transcript for this episode  on our website.

Some links to topics that came up in the discussion:

• mdx, the modified Markdown format that supports executing OCaml code blocks
• More on the 4 types of technical writing that James references
• Donald Knuth’s original book on Literate Programming
• More on John McPhee’s use of KEDIT
• Peter Seibel’s Coders at Work
• David Goodsell’s The Machinery of Life
• Scott Huler’s Defining the Wind

Some of James’s writing on our tech blog