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Is Programming Poetry?

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Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#21

Post by boken »

pmalynin wrote: post #17
rch wrote: post #10

E.E. Cummings might been writing code, with syntactically significant whitespace no less.

e e cummings actually please use the right capitalization and punctuation lol

"E.E. Cummings" is fine. It's what he used.[0]

On the top of Cummings, I have occasionally felt like I was faced with an incomplete set of instructions when reading certain of his poems. Of course, there's no particular reason to liken them to computer instructions; I've never seen anything in the poems to suggest a connection. Anything to link one art with another is a stretch—if we even accept that coding is an art.

(I think code can be, though it isn't as a rule. In the same way, writing can be artful but is typically workaday and unremarkable. This post, for an example.)

0: http://faculty.gvsu.edu/websterm/cummings/caps.htm

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#22

Post by jlg23 »

No, but a well written program has the qualities of a good poem: You want to read it and it you can follow it easily. And every word is exactly where it belongs.

I still remember with how much pleasure I read Edi Weitz' cl-ppcre - as a print-out, in bed.

More than once I did minor changes to programs that I attributed to my OCD just to get positive feedback from peers that I made the program more readable (say, changing (let ((x ..)) (when x ....)) to (when-let ((x ...)) ....)).

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#23

Post by nilved »

Harimwakairi wrote: post #18

No, it isn't. 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.

What is a poet?

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#24

Post by AUmrysh »

Poetry is about painting images with words. Often poetry will do this by not saying what is actually happening or the thought it intends to create in the reader.

A program is written to perform math, and it is generally considered bad to waste space with needless things. It doesn't aid the reader or the compiler or the execution to add unused variables. It's really bad in a program to do things in an unclear way.

Poetry can have ambiguities, good software can't.

They do both share some amount of necessity of context. Both often have abstraction. I would say poetry is kind of a playful use of language, whereas programming is really more of a clever use of math.

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#28

Post by veddox »

jlg23 wrote: post #22

No, but a well written program has the qualities of a good poem: You want to read it and it you can follow it easily. And every word is exactly where it belongs. I still remember with how much pleasure I read Edi Weitz' cl-ppcre - as a print-out, in bed. More than once I did minor changes to programs that I attributed to my OCD just to get positive feedback from peers that I made the program more readable (say, chang…

> a well written program has the qualities of a good poem: You want to read it and it you can follow it easily.

Have you ever read a poem by T.S. Eliot? A brilliant poet with an incredible gift for language, but I've been reading his "The Four Quartets" repeatedly for over a year and still don't understand much of it...

Good poetry is not necessarily readily understandable (and coming to think of it, neither is a good program). But once you have understood it you see that yes, "every word is exactly where it belongs".

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#29

Post by mabbo »

> Poetry is an art form that conveys not just meaning, but also emotion. You can’t express emotion through code.

Oh, code doesn't just express emotion- it instigates it. Usually pure, infernos of anger at the damned bastard who wrote it.

Re: Is Programming Poetry?

#30

Post by dang »

Much of this thread is a dismaying example of responding only to the title. Titles are the bikesheds of HN.

This is an article about learning programming from Alan Perlis in 1983—a rich topic. "Is programming poetry?" was obviously not meant to be taken literally: the subtitle is "yes and no" and the text makes clear that Perlis was being provocative. The article deserves deeper attention than this. It's about learning programming from a master who used unconventional methods, and a first-hand report on what Perlis himself wrote about in http://www.jsoftware.com/papers/perlis77.htm.

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