Ryan Florence

Hey do you need any more examples of how software development is like writing instead of like math? Because I got a great one for you.

Large companies often have huge amounts of written documentation. Salesforce, for example, has docs for end users, potential customers, employees of all stripes, external developers, and literally dozens of other categories of people.

Most of these pieces of documentation (save maybe github READMEs, and even those sometimes) are written by professional writers. But at scale, their output can't be just unstructured documents, like, just like opening a word doc and typing.

What they're writing has to be structured - broken down into component parts. This is for a number of reasons, but the one most interesting to us is _reuse_. They need to use pieces of a document in multiple places.