May 29, 2003
Poetry and Programming
"Writing code, he (Stuart Feldman) explains, is like writing poetry: every
word, each placement counts. Except that software is harder, because
digital poems can have millions of lines which are all somehow
interconnected. Try fixing programming errors, known as bugs, and you
often introduce new ones. So far, he laments, nobody has found a silver
bullet to kill the beast of complexity."
Survey: The Beast of Complexity; The Economist (London, UK); Apr 14,2001.
The syntactic link between poets and programmers, perhaps the strongest bond between artists and scientists, educes the relevance of an ancient tradition to our technologically rich but semantically impoverished culture.
Claiming that writing software is "harder" is rash and problematic but the comparison is a substantial one.
KMAC
Posted by kurt at May 29, 2003 12:57 PMComments
Do you have the entire article? Can you post or email it?
Posted by: peggy at May 29, 2003 02:30 PM
I would disagree with this comparison, except only at the lowest level. It's beyond obvious that programming is a unique form of creativity (at least it should be). Such comparisons limit the talk about programming as it's own art form, which I feel it is. There are myraid ways of programming a computer to do a task, all of which could be elegant. However, with poetry, the specific placement of words is fundamental, and such decisions lead the reader down a different path. True, the placement of words within the syntax of whichever language is key, but does not necessarily result in something fundamentally different, like in poetry. Programming is unique, I think, and people should treat it as a distinct form of creativity. Certainly, it has ties to other art forms, but simply viewing it as "like" poetry is problematic.
Posted by: will at May 29, 2003 03:08 PM
