Lazycoder

People communicate more effectively visually

I found this comment by Charles Petzold (yes, THAT Charles Petzold) on a book review Jeff Atwood did of his latest WPF book to be … interesting.

I’ve been mulling over Coding Horror’s analysis of two WPF books, not really thrilled about it, of course. The gist of it is that modern programming books should have color, bullet points, boxes, color, snippets, pictures, color, scannability, and color.

Does that remind you of anything?

Apparently the battle for the future of written communication is over. Prose is dead. PowerPoint has won.

The part that I find interesting is that the book in question is about programming against the Windows Presentation Framework. The framework that lets the user communicate visually with your program. Human beings communicate most effectively using visual cues. Body language. A glance. A frantic hand waving can signal danger quicker than words. When we want to understand whether the stock market is going up or down. Which more effectively conveys that information? A long list of numbers for the last 5 days. Or a line chart with “time” along the bottom?

The color that Jeff mentions the Nathan book having isn’t light pastel pages with bright pink numbers. The words aren’t candy coated Comic-Sans. The color is syntax highlighting, something that has increased programmer productivity for years now. It quickly allows you to pick out the languages key words from your text. The pictures aren’t of kittens and puppies, they are pictures of the output of the code being discussed. It’s the same reason the instructions for your IKEA bookshelf contain a picture of the final product and hardly any words. If you don’t know what you are building, how do you know when you’ve built it.

If the visual aspect of communication wasn’t all that important Mr. Petzold, why didn’t you write a “building applications for the windows command line” book?