Writing the Great American Startup “The ‘Great American Novel’ is the concept of a novel that is distinguished in both craft and theme as being the most accurate representative of the zeitgeist in the United States at the time of its writing.” (wikipedia) “My current theory is that programming is quite literally writing. The vast majority of programming is not conceptually difficult… We only make it difficult because we suck at writing. The vast majority of programmers aren’t fluent, and don’t even have a desire to be fluent. They don’t read other people’s code. They don’t recognise or use idioms. They don’t think *in the programming language*. Most code sucks because we have the fluency equivalent of 3 year olds trying to write a novel.” – wrook