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.

  One Response to “Poetry and Programming”

  1. Despite all you attempts to con­ceal it, I knew you were a sucker for my verse (and God knows what else, I shud­der to think). But that Blikzkreig cer­tifi­cate thing man, that was the Water­loo of poetry for me. It left me a poetic cas­trati I think — I wasn’t pub­lished, yet I was. I don’t think I ever wrote any­thing after that. I took to typ­ing after that — never looked back man, never!

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