Hello! I came across this community mostly through Mastodon. I work as a web developer at an information design studio (lots of overlap in "how to see and do cool things through digital interfaces" there), but have also been working on a lot of personal projects around poetic programming and poetic web experiences since my undergrad days. My more ambitious and confusing (to myself) projects include an experiment in trying to design and develop a programming language with poetry in mind. I haven't formally studied much programming language theory so it goes over my own head, like some of the more technically complicated projects shared here. But I am really enamoured with the overall idea of "feeling of computing" and am very excited to be here and to learn more!

Curious what you mean by poetic programming. Like, meter, or maybe just code with aesthetic qualities in general?

Yes please, what makes programming poetic for you if you care to share?

Lots of things! I struggle to encapsulate it all, but I think there's a critical and creative and at times philosophical aspect to code, which loops back to poetry (or a poetic spirit) for me. It's always been interesting to me to draw parallels between code and poetry — they're both very particular forms of writing, except one evokes emotion and one invokes some action (and may evoke emotion, too). Adding on to that, in a time when people are increasingly content to let LLMs generate code, I find it really meaningful for myself to grapple with the craft of writing code. How can we understand it critically (syntax, style, context — see the field of critical code studies) but also see opportunities for creativity and imagination as focused on code and coding practices? Not sure if I went too abstract there, but maybe short answer is that I really like writing code and have a strong emotional attachment to it, and that's the poetic tug for me. 🙂

Thinking about this code/poetry thing a bit more: have you already gone down the Forth/concatenative rabbit hole yet? It seems relevant. It's not just that the syntax is almost entirely just a sequence of actual words, though that helps, but there's also a particular philosophy of how to write code embodied in it that feels a bit poetic.

If one considers "haiku" to be poetry, then one might be literally interested in https://forthsalon.appspot.com

do look at @Katherine Yang's work on Coem y'all, which I was introduced to by @Daniel Temkin https://esoteric.codes/blog/five-esonatlangs

One unusual feature described in its grammar guide is its regex-based identifiers:

_let_ mis(t|sed) be "thick"

This declares mis, mist, and missed as different names for the same variable, initialized with the string "thick". Other metacharacters, including

|

and

?

, can also be used. This allows for wordplay that's often difficult in code poetry where variable names are locked down to a single string that can't be pluralized, verbed, or altered for other grammatical use.

Ah, I'm seeing the vision better now. 😄 Coem looks really neat.

ah, thank you @Jasmine Otto!! 😅

The regex-based identifiers remind a man of Ruby's aliases and the fact that there may be pragmatic rather than semantic reasons to use a different name. And @Katherine Yang "except [poetry] evokes emotion and [code] invokes some action (and may evoke emotion, too)" — I'll add that poetry also evokes action and has for thousands of years. One new thing though is poetry evoking action in machines. I'll spare you a story of how well advising a coding agent to come up with a fitting name for a subsystem upfront is an special way to encode in a single word what the subsystem should be like in a way more fundamental than a specification. Likewise, a poem might be a good way to capture a philosophy, likeness, or impression of the software foundational to it functional qualities. Answer what it feels like before what it does and how it does it.