Wriging

"Code is poetry" is rhetorical; it's a declaration of intent. In saying it the WordPress folks (and anyone who takes it up) isn't saying that code is literally poetry. They are using the phrase to make the point that code should be elegant, that it should be well-written, clear, concise---that we (those who write code) should strive to write the best code we can.

Thanks for the clarification Ben, it ties in with your blog post on the WSG London event and your discussion of Searle's 'Chinese Room'. I found that interesting and am still mulling over it.

I suppose I kind of knew that I was taking the 'code is poetry thing' too literally but part of me hoped to hear about some lone crusader who truly believes code is an avant-garde art form.

I do my fair share of coding now and then. The text editor is akin to the canvas. The code: the conditional loops, the memory handling, the logic statements, they make up the subroutines, functions or modules which are stanzas in a sense, each serving a particular purpose. The more efficient and logical its flow is, the more poetic it reads.

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I read a statement somewhere that about 90% of code in any given program has been written before. I agree that elegance and efficiency make for beauty in code, and as someone who shares brain hemispheres fairly equally, I see a creative genius in a well written string of PERL or an ingenious bit of PHP. But there's not a lot of oriniality that one could attribute to poetic license, which is the issue that I've always taken with that statement, at least in the back of my mind...

As someone who writes both poetry and code, I think it can be taken literally. It takes both talent and technical ability to write poetry, especially rhyming poetry that flows properly. The same is actually very true for writing code. For some, it starts with talent. For all of us, it takes some technical learning.

There is a rhythm to code after you've done the same kind of thing hundreds of times.

I don't think that all code is poetry, but I think that all code should be poetry.

Code should have form and structure, be resorceful and condense, and be fun to look at.

In fact, this inspired me to write a series on just this: Making Code Poetry Part I