From: Francis Hwang <sera@...>
Date: 2004-11-19T11:56:44+09:00
Subject: Re: The Poetry of Code


On Nov 18, 2004, at 1:46 PM, Michael DeHaan wrote:

> Is excessive boilerplate of over-casty static languages really poetry?
>   I don't think so.
>
> To put this in another light, maybe some people like reading Faulkner
> for his overly winded and indirect prose, I don't.   And that's why
> I'm here :)
>

Faulkner might be the wrong analogy, but then again I love both Ruby 
code and Faulkner's books. Faulkner's stuff is florid but also without 
the rigidity of Java ... you maybe could draw an analogy to Perl, which 
seems to me to be practiced by people who love the code on its semantic 
surface as opposed to whether it lets you get the job done elegantly.

If you had to draw a literary analogy from Java to an author, I'm not 
certain who you'd pick ... somebody who was into logical rigor? Some of 
the Nabokov I've read is like that, but then, I might just not be 
grokking what I've read.

F.