Is Programming Poetry? • Hacker News Board

Poetry is an entirely separate discipline with a long list of associated skills, some of which overlap with those possessed by a good programmer. You're not a poet unless you're a poet, so just call yourself a good coder for fuck's sake. It's not like it's less prestigious.

source: published poet who works as a software engineer.

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#19

Post by veddox » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 10:29 PM UTC

Being both a hobby programmer and a hobby poet, I concur with the author: yes and no.

There are some aspects to programming that have an aesthetic very similar to that of poetry. It is not in vain that we talk of "elegant" solutions to a problem, or say that [your favourite language] is "beautiful". So in that sense, yes, code can be a poem.

However, there are other areas where the two are worlds apart. First and foremost their purpose: code is meant to cause action (on the part of a computer). Any beauty is a side effect. Poetry is meant to be beautiful, to evoke feelings. If the reading of a poem causes an action in a reader, that is usually a side effect. So in that sense, no, code is definitely not poetry :D

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#20

Post by Scarblac » Fri, Oct 30, 2015, 10:29 PM UTC

branchless wrote: post #11

Vogon poetry in most code bases.

ctrl-F Vogon, check.

I guess it's _possible_ to write poetry in programming language, but the only times I've seen someone try the result was forgettable (it looked like a non syntactical mix of a number of languages and sucked as poetry).

Real code is only poetry in the Vogon sense.