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

[Warren Postma]

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