Sun 9 Jul 2006

Interesting Writing In Meeting Minutes

Whilst researching a particular algorithm this morning, I followed a link from Google to the Algebra of Programming Research Group at Oxford University. More specifically, to the minutes of their weekly(?) meetings.

One of the authors of these minutes, Sharon Curtis, has an interesting writing style for these sort of notes. This is a group who discuss fairly complex algorithms and give examples in Haskell — in other words, not exactly targetting a "person in the street" audience. I assume the notes are mostly for internal consumption and, yet, I couldn't stop reading them. They are interesting, fairly understandable out of context and are scattered with throwaway lines that you normally don't find in such writing, but which is not at all distracting or out of place. A few examples:

• (talking about a particular algorithm representation using matrices) "If you represent a matrix as a list of lists, the proof that transposition is its own inverse is a pig (not least because it isn't true, on account of ragged lists)." (2 Dec, 2005)
• (after discussing a hat colour guessing problem) "With thoughts of suicidal hat-wearers in our brains, we all trooped off." (28 Oct, 2005)
• (talking about Sudoku algorithms) "Are the students going to understand this? What we'd like to do is show them how to treat the data structure as a whole, not just cell-by-cell. 'Wholemeal programming', said GJ. [...] It was suggested that repeated prunings would be a good idea: 'prunes go with wholemeal programming'" (14 Oct, 2005)
• "RSB has a problem with an usherette in a cinema. No, not like that. An imaginary usherette." (7 Oct, 2005)
• "Room 441 bore a distinct resemblance to a shingle beach today, because on arrival, RSB was busy putting pebbles in buckets." (30 April, 2004)

A nice way to spend a couple of hours on a Sunday morning.

Topics: software, writing