code poetry?

I’ve always been interested in writing. I even wrote a handful of poems in my pre-computer-geek days. But I never thought I could make a living “just writing” so, shortly after getting married, I went back to school in search of a practical profession.

It wasn’t long before I stumbled upon computer programming, and began a 30-plus year career writing code and being well paid for it. Eventually I even managed to get paid for teaching others to write code!

After retiring from the teaching position, I decided to take up writing again. But wait, had I really ever given it up? No, I’ve merely been writing in different languages (Fortran, C, Perl, PHP) instead of English; and for a different audience (compilers, interpreters and co-workers) instead of the general English-speaking public.

I’ve been writing code prose instead of English prose. I would not say that any of my code has risen to the level of code poetry, but I had no doubt about its existence. This was before I googled “code poetry” and discovered that an entire community and literature by that name exists. One can not question its legitimacy since it has a Wikipedia article, and one can easily find an example on the internet: “Black Perl” by Larry Wall. (Yes, the Larry Wall who created the Perl programming language!)

Still, I believe I will choose to pursue a somewhat larger audience than just compilers, interpreters and the code poetry community. Henceforth the bulk of my prose will be in English (y tal vez Español).