Published on

Poetry and Programming

Authors

A course in object oriented programming is what's taking up most of my time these days. My professor came up with this little gem yesterday … “Computer programs are like poetry – they are never finished, only abandoned.”

When I was in high school, there was a guy called Deepak Tony Thomas who was in the same class as me. We weren't close friends or anything, but we would hang out a little bit. His parents lived in Bangalore (I think) so he got to stay in a house all my himself – unimaginably cool, so we called him the Boss. He would write poetry and show us his work once in a while. Rex and I would laugh at his poems, although I secretly thought it was cool because he used complicated words, and the lines seemed to rhyme. When we got to organize a cultural festival at our school , we called it Blitzkrieg and the Boss got to write a four line poem on the certificates.

Why am I talking about this now? Well, he seems to have transitioned from writing poetry to writing about programming. Why, they even have a picture of him on the books he writes. The professor was right – writing poetry and programming must be about the same.