I am a big fan of “understanding through writing” (you learn through trying to explain). The difficulty in technical writing is always balancing the incompatible competing needs for conciseness, clarity, correctness and utility. There is a next-level of writing and understanding (that I am not at, but I am becoming more able to recognize) where these things synergize instead of compete. This post will close with such an example from Edsger Dijkstra (in its entirety):

Elegance is not a dispensable luxury but a factor that decides between success and failure.

This covers so much of what I am trying to say.

(And thank you to Peteris Krumins for blogging on this)

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