TITLE: Poetry as a Metaphor for Software
AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford
DATE: October 16, 2013 11:38 AM
DESC: 
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BODY:
I was reading Roger Hui's
<A HREF="http://keiapl.org/rhui/remember.htm">
   Remembering Ken Iverson</A>
this morning on the elliptical, and it reminded me of this passage
from
<A HREF="http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242">
   A Conversation with Arthur Whitney</A>.
Whitney is a long-time APL guru and the creator of the A, K, and Q
programming languages.  The interviewer is Bryan Cantrill.

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
<B>BC</B>: Software has often been compared with civil engineering,
 but I'm really sick of people describing software as being like a
 bridge.  What do you think the analog for software is?

<B>AW</B>: Poetry.

<B>BC</B>: Poetry captures the aesthetics, but not the precision.

<B>AW</B>: I don't know, maybe it does.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

A poet's use of language is quite precise.  It must balance forces
in many dimensions, including sound, shape, denotation, and
connotation.  Whitney seems to understand this.
<A HREF="http://www.dreamsongs.com/">
   Richard Gabriel</A>
must be proud. 

Brevity is a value in the APL world.  Whitney must have a similar
preference for short language names.  I don't know the source of
his names A, K, and Q, but I like Hui's explanation of where J's
name came from:

<BLOCKQUOTE><EM>
 ... on Sunday, August 27, 1989, at about four o'clock in the
 afternoon, [I] wrote the first line of code that became the
 implementation described in this document.

 The name "J" was chosen a few minutes later, when it became
 necessary to save the interpreter source file for the first
 time.
</EM></BLOCKQUOTE>

Beautiful.  No messing around with branding.  Gotta save my file.
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