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What do writing poetry and writing code have in common? This question started as a hallway conversation between Stuart Feldman, vice president, On Demand Business Transformation Strategy, and Edward Bevan, vice president, Research Communications, and grew into the recent Innovation speaker panel.
"Writing code is like writing poetry," said Stuart in the April 2001 Economist. Ed, a poet, agreed, but disagreed with Stuart's belief that writing code is much harder. As moderators of the Poetry vs. Programming panel, they welcomed poets Thomas Lux and Vijay Seshadri, and IBM researchers John Richards, Josh Scribner and John Vlissides to expand the debate.
Proof in the poetry
This event, designed to continue the momentum from last year's Innovation Days program, created a cross-pollinization of ideas between the worlds of art and technology. More than 100 people at Watson attended the panel, which was also broadcast to IBM's U.S. labs.
Vijay Seshadri, whose work is frequently featured in The New Yorker, opened the discussion by comparing Euclid's prime number proof with Wallace Stevens's "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating." Both are startlingly similar in their circular rhythm and beauty; however, while the theorem's argument is conclusive, Vijay said "none of the poem's meanings are exhaustive."
Researcher John Richards then made a further link to technology. Describing code as "thousands of objects running around doing interesting things," he observed, "They can't do anything without each other: relationship is fundamentally part of this. And to me, good poetry speaks to the inner-connectedness of all things."
Symmetry and mechanics
The structure of code made senior Web master Josh Scribner visualize a Spanish church's symmetric branching columns. "A lot of what we see in our code is how we construct it," he said, "and what we see in poetry is some of that symmetry too."
Researcher John Vlissides read "Ink Evaporates Alone in Bed", by computer scientist and poet Richard P. Gabriel, then mentioned a distinguishing feature of code writing. Unlike poetry, he said, "programs can generate other programs." Thomas Lux argued, "Poems jump into each other too." Paraphrasing Eliot, he said "every poem depends on every other poem that comes before it."
To portray the intricate mechanics of poetry, Thomas compared them to a bridge's construction. "All the engineering prowess that's inside a bridge makes it not only utilitarian, but aesthetically pleasing," he adds. "And poems have that kind of engineering in them."
The ride of the poem
That can mean rhyme, meter and attention to detail. "All of those things are going on in order to deliver the ride of the poem," he said, "which the regular reader-who is reading the poem for pleasure-doesn't need to know or notice."
Programmers could relate to building structures never seen by readers, or in their case, end-users. Thomas asked them if writing code also requires an imaginative leap and multiple drafts. "We go through the same trial at the micro level," John Richards replied, "but debuggers and compilers yell at us when we make mistakes."
The IBM scientists discovered much in common with the poets: Josh admits, when writing code, he "zones out on the world and focuses very much on what [he] is writing." John Richards says, "Compression in good code, near the end, gets really tight." And John Vlissides adds, "Both poetry and programming provoke a response in the beholder."
The conversation was lively and dynamic, causing the event to run a bit over its allotted time. But, before the book-signing reception, the poets read from their own works. Vijay read his new book's title poem, "The Long Meadow", and Thomas presented "The People of the Other Village." But it is the last stanza of Thomas's "An Horatian Notion," read earlier, which sums up what programmers and poets will always agree upon:
"You make the thing because you love the thing
and you love the thing because someone else loved it
enough to make you love it.
And with that your heart like a tent peg pounded
toward the earth's core.
And with that your heart on a beam burns
through the ionosphere.
And with that you go to work."
Ann Cefola is a writer based in Scarsdale, New York
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| The Poets |
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Thomas Lux
Collections include The Cradle Place, The Street of Clocks, and more. |
"The poet has to have deep intuition, imaginative powers, ability to leap. But you also have to have the tools and knowledge and a kind of cold objectivity. To me, it's a process working between the deeply intuitive and ruthless objectivity.
We've always known that there is pleasure in, say, rhyme, and the repetition of sounds. Now they have CAT-scan machines and you can actually see the brain lighting up with pleasure -- the pleasure centers of the brain lighting when there is a repetition of sound.
I love poetry because it makes me a little more human, a little more alive, and a little less alone on the planet."
"Great poetry is when the ratio of implicit meaning to explicit meaning verges on the infinite.
[Euclid's prime number proof] is considered one of the most beautiful proofs in number theory because it is so simple, so clear, so ancient -- at that point when mathematics was in its pristine youth, when it was just investigation of mathematical entities in and of themselves. I don't think any of these people were imagining what mathematics has done since then for any of us.
Wallace Stevens has said "a poem should evade the mind almost successfully." That is, we're in the business of getting the mind to the point where it can't quite reach the object of its thought."
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John Richards
Research Staff Member and Manager |
"Mere survival doesn't make code beautiful by any means. Beautiful code, for lots of reasons that are evident on reflection, can be understood."
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John Vlissides
Research, object-oriented design, implementation tools & techniques |
"There is lots of beauty in software. Sometimes it's false beauty."
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Josh Scribner
Senior Webmaster, IBM Research |
"Everything has got a lot of careful syntax to it, and everyone who works with me knows I tend to be stickler for "Have you tabbed out your code to the right depth?" I might as well have been a classical poet who said, "Did you get enough syllables in your line?""
"There's code that makes you smile, the structure is right and clearly you got it right.
Then there is the other stuff where it's terrible and painful to get to the next semi-colon."
-- Stu Feldman
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