> And yet, many writers are still paid by the word, and many book contracts still specify target page counts.
That doesn't really mean anything, after all some managers still judge productivity by LoC. They both can be bad.
And at least IMO, using word counts for books is giving very wrong incentives. I've stopped reading non-fiction books because absolutely every single one i've tried to read over the years always *ALWAYS* gets way too wordy, spending entire chapters in what one could fit in a blog post. And i'm writing that as someone who also tends to err on the "wordy" side - both when writing and when reading (i.e. when in doubt, i think it is better to write more). But books tend to overdo it to fill those contract pagecounts.
Right, and that's why I said at the end of my post, it may just be that length is a bad metric in both cases.
However, I'd posit that if you went into a forum of professional writers and asked how they felt about word count measurements, they'd be a lot more divided than we are regarding lines of code. Or, to pick another example, NaNoWriMo seems to be pretty popular among aspiring authors, and that's all about the wordcount. Maybe it shouldn't be—or maybe there's something we're missing.
For example: it may be the case that lines of code is a useful goal during certain phases of a project—maybe while prototyping, for example. Just like how a target word count is useful when writing a rough draft, but obviously stupid while revising a draft.
Although, an author might set a goal to get below a certain word count during the revision phase—and that again might be a useful target for programmers refactoring code.
That doesn't really mean anything, after all some managers still judge productivity by LoC. They both can be bad.
And at least IMO, using word counts for books is giving very wrong incentives. I've stopped reading non-fiction books because absolutely every single one i've tried to read over the years always *ALWAYS* gets way too wordy, spending entire chapters in what one could fit in a blog post. And i'm writing that as someone who also tends to err on the "wordy" side - both when writing and when reading (i.e. when in doubt, i think it is better to write more). But books tend to overdo it to fill those contract pagecounts.