Everything has context. Paul Graham is a leader in the startup scene so more than likely he's talking about the types text relevant to startups. Blog posts, press releases, etc.
Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?
Please drop swipes like that from your arguments here, and generally please don't escalate hostility even when someone is wrong or you feel they are. Your comment would be fine without that last sentence.
Edit: as for "Try to not be autistic for a second" - we ban accounts that do that. Please review the guidelines and take the intended spirit of the site more to heart, so we won't have to ban you.
I do not have much of an opinion on the underlying debate happening here^1, but I will disagree with this comment.
I do not believe that the article's prescription is confined to business writing.
> Paul Graham is a leader in the startup scene
That is true. But Graham is also a self-described essayist. He was writing long before he started Y Combinator, and his essays often discuss writing as a thing unto itself. For example, his "Nerds" essay mentions that one of his goals for life in high school was to write well^2.
Given that Graham is deeply interested in writing, and that the article doesn't explicitly confine itself to business writing, I think it's quite a stretch to assume that this essay is only talking about business writing.
> Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?
This is a strawman (and also unnecessarily combative).
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[^1]: Well, see my top-level comment. But that's not really relevant to this comment.
[^2]: "There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in school, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things." http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
If "more than likely" he's talking about "the types of text relevant to startups" then surely that would be stated in an essay tooting the virtues of "simple." However, that doesn't appear to be the case.
It seems more like Paul Graham might be talking about the kind of writing he does himself. Like essays. However, even in such a case, his point is debatable. Which is what people are doing here — debating.
No one is assuming he's "talking about James Joyce." You must be confused. He's talking about a certain type of writing style and making contestable generalizations about it. People are illustrating the contestable points with examples.
I think the essay is clearly about _non-fiction_ writing. It's arguing about how best to communicate ideas (he uses the term 'ideas' several times).
Sure, fiction can be trying to communicate things, and sometimes even ideas, but to me it's pretty obvious that the essay isn't trying to give advice for fiction writing in general.
It's pretty obvious to me too. That's not the point.
The essay makes a generic statement about the superiority of a particular, although loosely defined, writing style.
People debate the edge cases of that statement, showing its limits, and pointing to counter examples.
The result is that the content of the essay is reduced to a very banal statement of the type: "All other things being equal, prefer writing something simple rather than not simple." As an aesthetic preference, it's all well and good. As a persuasive argument, rather lacking. It "tries to prove too much."
The other person (at the top of this sub-thread) did say "Both of these points considered, I disagree entirely with the premise. There can be value to dense, even perhaps enigmatic writing. I would say that the greatest works of English literature tend towards that direction (James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace)." I would not consider these edge cases, because I don't think literature is relevant to the essay and its purposes.
If you want to restrict Graham's argument to non-fiction, I'll happily grant you that.
But let me give you a bit more context:
As a Frenchman, when I think "Essay", my mind almost automatically reaches for two authors: Montaigne and Pascal (e.g. in his Pensées).
"Simple" is probably the last qualifier I would use to describe their works. They're not simple. They're complex, rich, beautiful, copiously quoting from classical authors and yet often crystal clear. They have the same quality poetry has where replacing a word by another damages the precision of the message and images conveyed.
That is also true of non-fiction prose in longer form. I shudder to think what could become of Tocqueville's writing style, a peculiar mix of classical and romantic, if it were translated into "simple" language.
Again, why the fuck would you assume Paul Graham is talking about James Joyce?