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  • I like the idea that arbitrary constraints can actually improve writing. Without a constraint, it's easy to fall back on familiar phrasing, while having to work around something unusual forces you to reconsider each word. I wonder if this applies to programming and other creative work too.
    by unicorn_platfor
  • suckerpinch has a great video where he uses an LLM to do this same thing automatically

    https://tom7.org/bovex/

    by ivw
  • > At the same time, who among us didn’t nod in recognition at least, having once spent hours massaging a button UI string or a tooltip just to get it to fit under the certain width in a densely packed interface?

    I did, and then I got a customer email about how they were using a display-zoom OS accessibility feature and things were truncated on their device. :')

    See also: localizing your interface to German

    by gyomu

  •   This might potentially
  rejuvenate the writing
  by disrupting habitual
  patterns, which forces
  more original choices.
    by card_zero
  • I wonder if at any point during writing, the heroic author of that Super Metroid guide learned that "missiles" are not spent "missles", and decided to own the mistake rather than reword the entire guide.

    Also, the font used for the monospace examples in the post is a great kick to the nostalgia. Which one is it? It reminds me of https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/fontlist/font?ibm_vga_...

    by _jackdk_
  • In programming certain word choices are valuable in this way. It's sad that pairs like true/false, good/bad, first/rest, and left/right are unequal length. But there are nice pairs like old/new, head/tail, fast/slow, same/diff, and right/wrong, which can help with create natural vertical alignment throughout a function.
    by AgentOrange1234
  • In a similar vein, Taylor Otwell from Laravel writes his comment blocks exactly three lines long and each line is three characters shorter than the line above, e.g.

        /*
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    | Application Name
    |--------------------------------------------------------------------------
    |
    | This value is the name of your application, which will be used when the
    | framework needs to place the application's name in a notification or
    | other UI elements where an application name needs to be displayed.
    |
    */
    https://github.com/laravel/framework/blob/13.x/config/app.ph...
    by easydidit
  • There's a similar anecdote Gillian Anderson recently revealed during an interview on the X-Files, saying Chris Carter had an OCD-like habit to write dialog to conform to certain text layout preferences (no widows[1]) in the script, which made for the show's distinctive style of dialog cadence.

    1 = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widows_and_orphans

    by sho_hn

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