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On programming and poetry

Some thoughts on how programming’s unlikely relations to poetry, and some implications of those relations

But even there, if I remember correctly, it was mentioned rather as a generic synonym for “something beautiful/pleasant to read,” though the users of terse languages might be, indeed, closer to agreeing with the value of “pass the experience in an intuitive way via carefully crafted line of text.”) But time and again, when I have this conversation with people (colleagues or just participants of online discussions), it is a two-stop track: first, “it is all subjective, and just depends on who likes what,” and when presented with less-subjective analysis/explanation about how the text/code might be perceived, the second and final stop is “maybe, but I don’t understand why you pay so much attention to this, it is all nitpicking.” The end goal here, again, is not some abstract “beauty” or “engineering excellence” but pragmatic values we all share: maintainability, openness to change—things that are affected with clarity of understanding, which, in turn, depends on how the things are expressed.

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