Editorial Engineering in Practical Software Production

Today software engineers are encoding engineers who configure complex code structures and mostly worry about the speed and scalability of solutions. Yet every practical program has an editorial structure as well as an encoding structure and all the practical value lies in the editorial structure but today these structures are seen as secondary. Encoding is still important in schemaless software engineering but editorial engineering is more important and this is a new development in software engineering.

We all use the same editorial systems to say all we mean and mean all that we say but schema-structured software solutions are limited to a very small editorial range. In schemaless software the editorial range is ten to a hundred times greater so systematic editorial engineering is required. There’s no reason to invent new tools and techniques for editorial engineering because these have long been mature in the publishing world and they come with a mature practice culture that starts familiar middle-school editorial skills.

Editorial engineering really is an empirical engineering discipline because it’s subject matter is the high technology of technical information. Technical information itself is a forty-thousand year old mass technology that well all work to improve all the time and it’s build on authorities, authentic reference models in physical and practical reality. Technical information is the only sort we actually understand in depth and this understanding starts with the classic elements of composition we learn in the seventh grade.

We’re not used to thinking of technical language as a technology in its own right, let alone a high technology, but like all high technologies it has a highly principled basis for practice firmly rooted in the testable applied sciences. Editorial analysts in the publishing world have, of necessity, been exploring practical English for a century by systematically taking it apart to see what makes it tick so today technical English is thoroughly understood today and that deep understanding provides a convenient starting point for editorial engineering in practical software production.

Today encoding style is seen as the most important thing in software engineering and style is always important but in practical software it’s editorial subject matter that pays the bills. Subject matter is the primary focus schemaless software engineering and this is how editorial engineers will produce new kinds of sophisticated software solutions by making the best possible use of the high technology of technical language.