Code Poetry
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This is a titbit post, a little code delicacy. No affiliations, just personal appreciation.
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I’ve stumbled upon an interesting and peculiar group of programmers from Stanford submitting entries to the Code Poetry Slam. Intrigued, I started reading pieces of code. “Is this poetry?”. Nevertheless, I sigh, it compiles!
A code that compiles simply means that it was fully analysed by the compiler — the component that translates a programming language that is human-friendly to machine language understood by the computer’s processor — verifying it is written according to the rules of the programming language chosen.
They were poems written in a programming language meant for computer interpretation, although any human could read them. Sure, it is convenient to have some basic knowledge in programming to fully understand the extent of its beauty, but the wordplay is charming and expresses the artistic value of the programer.
I´ve been writing poetry long before I started coding and often wondered how both acts of writing are strangely interconnected. There is something elegant when we write code correctly indented too. The act of creativity and abstraction that is necessary to visualise logically those blocks of code in our heads, as well as the intriguing learning process of a new language, brings the programer to the same “sitting spot” as the poet. There is an empty page, an empty editor. Full of possibilities, where both want to communicate an idea and build a feeling.
Impressed with this “new born genre”, as WIRED mentioned, I dig further and discovered the code {poems} project. The call for poets was specially appealing:
Code to speak about life or death, love or hate. Code meant to be read, not run. — Ishac Bertran, from code {poems}
A great geek artifact to be kept for the generations to come, as we live the era of the fast rise and fall of great programming languages. This project delivered a book where engineers, coders and artists collaborated with the goal to explore beautifully the possibilities of code expression.
:// It is possible to subscribe for the 2nd edition of the book, by leaving an email here.
