
The computer poetry of J. M. Coetzee’s early programming career - cossatot
https://blog.hrc.utexas.edu/2017/06/28/the-computer-poetry-of-j-m-coetzees-early-programming-career/
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SonOfLilit
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/](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](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](https://docstore.mik.ua/orelly/perl/prog3/ch27_02.htm)

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tangue
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."_

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guuz
He fictionalized his time as a computer programmer in the book 'Youth'. It's
superb.

~~~
ahussain
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.

~~~
pmoriarty
Should one's younger self's ideals get to trump one's older self's values?

~~~
logicallee
>Should one's younger self's ideals get to trump one's older self's values?

yes, of course. Haven't you seen Citizen Kane? Do you think Larry Page and
Sergey Brin would enshrine "don't be evil" today (in fact this has been
retired) - or have as a mission statement, to make all information universally
accessible and useful?

would they write in a prospectus, today, as a risk;

" Our corporate culture has contributed to our success, and if we cannot
maintain this culture as we grow, we could lose the innovation, creativity and
teamwork fostered by our culture, and our business may be harmed."

back in the day, every byte on Google's homepage was counted.

cf. Chrome's memory usage today.

Absolutely, young ideals trump old ideals. (Technically, ethically,
culturally, etc.)

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danidiaz
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.

~~~
altotrees
A really interesting thought. I wonder what languages and platforms Kafka
would favor...

~~~
fishnchips
I remember feeling like Josef K. when writing C++ and getting error output
from gcc.

------
altotrees
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.

