One year ago I paused my programming life and started writing a novel, with the illusion that my new activity was deeply different than the previous one. A river of words later, written but more often rewritten, I’m pretty sure of the contrary: programming big systems and writing novels have many common traits and similar processes.
The most obvious parallel between the two activities is that in both of them you write something. Code is not prose written in a natural language, yet it has a set of fixed rules (a grammar), certain forms that most programmers will understand as natural and others that, while formally correct, will sound hard to grasp.