Re: boring the reader to death (wasRe: Lambda: the Ultimate DesignFlaw

Donn Cave wrote: 

That's an odd thing to say.  Poetry is verbose, florid?
Python is Dutch.


Ha. I'm vaguely dutch, whatever that means.

I would say if there is a sister word for "Programming" in the english language, it isn't Poetry and it surely isn't Prose. It's Dialectic.
I appreciate the idea of "Code Poetry", and I find more than a few coders out there with more than a rudimentary appreciation of Poetry as well, but I don't like the analogy. No slight to Poetry is intended. Rather, I intend it as a compliment. Code has an almost entirely practical purpose, Malbol et al excluded. Poetry, except in cases of extraordinarily bad poetry, may have little "practical" purpose.

Now dialectic. I like that word. And I think the art of programming is somewhere in the Late-Medeival period right now. From Merriam Webster, meanings 1,5,6 seem rather sympathetic to texts used in the creation of software:

Dialectic

1. LOGIC
5. Any systematic reasoning, exposition, or argument that juxtaposes opposed or contradictory ideas and usually seeks to resolve their conflict/an intellectual exchange of ideas
6 : the dialectical tension or opposition between two interacting forces or elements

One way to look at Code is as a textual abstraction of a design. Having been flattened from brain-space into a two dimension matrix of latin glyphs, certain semantic/meta-data is typically omitted. Thus a classical programming problem in many languages: The "Write-only-code" syndrom. You wrote it, it runs, but you're afraid even to touch it yourself. Python is stronger than other languages I have used. When I go back to Python code I've written long enough ago to have forgotten everything about, I am more able to pick it up and work with it than I am with other less agile languages. I'm not merely talking about pedantic details of literal code-readability, I'm talking about the ability to intuit design from implementation, and the orthogonality of the design of the system to the to the faculty of human reason. (In not so many words: Python fits my brain.)

Warren

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