[karmakaze]

There is a good message here if you don't get distracted by whatever may particlarly bother you about the presentation.

> You don't need complex sentences to express complex ideas. [...] Informal language is the athletic clothing of ideas.

I interpret this as following my basic mode of operation: express everything as simply as I can, even if that makes my brilliant idea sound so obvious. The goal isn't to make myself seem smart, it's to get the idea across. With practice this is natural and you find yourself able to express more complex things than you thought you could. If I use complex ways of describing less complex things I'd be putting a lower limit on what I could express.

Basically, how would Richard Feynman say it? He was a master of using the simplest descriptions of the most complex subjects.

The same goes for coding style. There is a time where fancy metaprogramming will be needed to make something compact and manageable. But that isn't the first thing you should reach for in simpler cases.

[watwut]

But the way people talk naturally does not lead to simple sentences nor simple constructions. People talk in runabout ways, add unnecessary details, miss others and then go back to fill them in. Some people do in fact use complex words and others use too simple wrong words when they speak. People use tone of voice to add meaning and also gestures.

Transcript of natural conversation is not a simple readable text. Instead, it requires a lot of editing to become one.

[karmakaze]

That's exactly the details to be dropped. Don't get hung up on how the article started with "natural speech", that's the bathwater. The baby is promote simple sentence structures and word choices that convey the problem and solution concisely without fancy complexity of language that doesn't add to understanding.

[watwut]

I really dont think the article is good at promoting that idea. And one problem (frequent with Paul Graham writing) is that it builds false dichotomy in between supposedly simple talk language and complicated written language.

Written language is not inherently more convoluted and complex. Not even on discussion forums with untrained people who dont read after themselves.

> It seems to be hard for most people to write in spoken language.

The written texts end up convoluted frequently because people do write them as they think they would speak. People speak in complex sentences, tone of voice making the difference. Then they see all the horrible warts and try to fix them - badly.

Also, the article does not contain actionable advice on how to write. It does not help you to deal with sentence structure nor help you to refactor bad sentence. It is fluff.

[karmakaze]

> I really dont think the article is good at promoting that idea.

It isn't. That's why I was pointing out that there's still some value here if you focus on it and not the presentation and all the parts of it you disagree with or otherwise dislike.