The Compiler and the Poet
A short story of reading code as if it were poetry and writing code as if it were prose
Every Sunday I have fun and try and write a short story on an existing Software Enchiridion entry, or sometimes one I’m still playing with. This short story is a glimpse into a future maxim: “Read Code as if it Were Poetry, Write Code as if it Were Prose”.
I truly hope you enjoy it half as much as I did when composing it.
The Compiler and the Poet
In the Great Library of Córdoba, a young scholar found two manuscripts shelved together as though by accident.
One was a poem in careful hexameters, unsigned, but resonant with images of rivers that remembered their own sources.
The other was a fragment of code, written in an obsolete dialect of C, whose comments were in Latin.
He began to read the poem. His mind leapt and drifted: each word opened into metaphor, and the metaphor into silence. He felt himself walking not in the library, but beside the river of the poem, knowing and not knowing its destination. The ambiguities multiplied, and with them, his pleasure.
He turned to the code. His mind constricted, sharpened. He traced each symbol into its syntax, its syntax into semantics, each line into a structure, each structure into a mechanism. He did not wander here; he simulated with his mind the machine. The variables were stones placed in careful order; if one were removed, the river would not flow.
The scholar, disoriented, looked back and forth between the texts. In one, ambiguity was a trapdoor to meaning; in the other, it was a fatal error. In one, he was the machine executing the words; in the other, the words executed the machine.
That night, he dreamt of a compiler that produced poems instead of binaries, and of a poet who wrote verses that could calculate sums. In the dream, he asked which was more real: the poem pretending to be a machine, or the machine pretending to be a poem.
He woke with the suspicion that reading, whether of poetry or of code, was always the same act: to let the words build a world inside the brain, and then to live, briefly, within it.