If, like me, you were hoping to find code that is poetry, a few recommendations:
whytheluckystiff, or _why, was a very colorful persona in the early English-speaking Ruby community who wrote some very poetic code (some of it production grade) and inspired a lot of people (me included), and eventually disappeared one day when he was outed. Maybe start with Why's (Poignant) Guide to Programming that is a literary work that is also a Ruby tutorial, available at http://poignant.guide/, and continue by reading archives of his blog (where he posted hand-drawn and sometimes animated poetry in Ruby) and libraries he wrote (I strongly recommend Camping.rb, a 4k minimal MVC framework, that was at once very poetic and production-ready.)
Other than that, if you can read x86 asm I recommend this book of Koans/Poems/whatever you call them, written by someone I know and extremely beautiful: https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html
Coetzee wrote the best description of programming I've ever read : " The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them."
I read that book in college and it frightened me so much. I was worried by the prospect of selling your soul in a thousand pieces. I.e. making many "compromises", which individually don't mean much, but taken together will turn you into exactly the kind of person you wanted to avoid becoming.
This is amazing. Disgrace is one of my favorite novels of all time and I always found it fascinating how versatile Coetzee is. The man seems to be good at everything.
If, like me, you were hoping to find code that is poetry, a few recommendations:
whytheluckystiff, or _why, was a very colorful persona in the early English-speaking Ruby community who wrote some very poetic code (some of it production grade) and inspired a lot of people (me included), and eventually disappeared one day when he was outed. Maybe start with Why's (Poignant) Guide to Programming that is a literary work that is also a Ruby tutorial, available at http://poignant.guide/, and continue by reading archives of his blog (where he posted hand-drawn and sometimes animated poetry in Ruby) and libraries he wrote (I strongly recommend Camping.rb, a 4k minimal MVC framework, that was at once very poetic and production-ready.)
Other than that, if you can read x86 asm I recommend this book of Koans/Poems/whatever you call them, written by someone I know and extremely beautiful: https://www.xorpd.net/pages/xchg_rax/snip_00.html
And in the Perl community there's a long tradition of polyglot perl/English poems: https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/prog3/ch27_02.htm
Coetzee wrote the best description of programming I've ever read : " The more he has to do with computing, the more it seems to him like chess: a tight little world defined by made-up rules, one that sucks in boys of a certain susceptible temperament and then turns them half-crazy, as he is half-crazy, so that all the time they deludedly think they are playing the game, the game is in fact playing them."
He fictionalized his time as a computer programmer in the book 'Youth'. It's superb.
I read that book in college and it frightened me so much. I was worried by the prospect of selling your soul in a thousand pieces. I.e. making many "compromises", which individually don't mean much, but taken together will turn you into exactly the kind of person you wanted to avoid becoming.
Should one's younger self's ideals get to trump one's older self's values?
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Michel Houellebecq worked as a programmer, too (and he didn't like it).
I suppose Kafka would work in programming, had he been born in our time.
And Charles Stross worked in IT at startups in the late 1990s.
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/who_am_i/autobio-all-redacte...
A really interesting thought. I wonder what languages and platforms Kafka would favor...
I remember feeling like Josef K. when writing C++ and getting error output from gcc.
Well, given that Apache Kafka is written in Scala and Java, I would suppose...
Brainfuck?
Houellebecq's first book Whatever is about the unfruitfulness of programming.
This is amazing. Disgrace is one of my favorite novels of all time and I always found it fascinating how versatile Coetzee is. The man seems to be good at everything.