The Poetry Of Programming

Lumpish Scholar writes "Sun's Richard Gabriel (possibly the only person with both a Ph.D. in computer science and an MFA in poetry) talks about "the connections between creativity, software, and poetry": "People say, 'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?' The answer is that we've been building bridges for thousands of years, and while we can make incremental improvements to bridges, the fact is that every bridge is like some other bridge that's been built.... But in software ... we're rolling out -- if not the first -- at most the seventh or eighth version. We've only been building software for 50 years, and almost every time we're creating something new.""

Comments

Software Haiku

[Hayzeus]

Process swiftly crash NULL pointers everywhere O -- Electric Fence!

Try building a bridge...

[gUmbi]

Try building a bridge:

a) with half the crew and materials required
b) in a quarter of the required time
c) that will be retrofitted to support train tracks and a second level
d) that will be backwards compatible with the previous bridge
e) that is better than your competitors bridge

Jason.

Re:Try building a bridge...

[nrd907s]

You forgot....

f) Then halfway through the specs are changed and you are told to make a tunnel

i wonder

[forkboy]

I bet this guy owns that "Code Poet" shirt from Think Geek.

Re:Yes

[owenb]

ee cummings literary works (only I use more punctuation marks than she does)

Ah, yes, the great emily ermintrude cummings. Her work was far superior to that upstart edward estlin, wasn't it?

How come we can't ....

[Chillblaine]

'Well, how come we can't build software the way we build bridges?'

Obvious reasons. Those foolish cavemen (or whoever) that built the first bridges didn't patent the design and copyright the plans. Then hide the bridge in big black boxes so nobody could try design something similar.

They also didn't have to worry about the greedy land owners at either side of the river charging them huge amounts (or just refusing them) to get information on ground they needed to build the bridge ends on.

$DEITY bless the software industry!

Epic Software

[Reziac]

Truly epic software is written in iambic pentameter. Portable utilities are written in sonnet form. Quick-n-dirty kludges are written as limericks. Haiku is for batch files.

Re: Haiku is for batch files.

[SlashChick]

"Haiku is for batch files."

Hehehe...

for each file in .
do sed s slash leaf slash tree
on every line found; done

Okay, so that's a shell script... but it was just as fun to write. ;)