how is a computer program expressive speech? (Score 1)

[sent also by e-mail]

Speaking to your question, there are few greater expositions upon the craft of programming than Fred Brooks' "The Mythical man Month" (I keep the 1st Edition, 1975) - which is a text of biblical proportion in the programming community.

I shall not type out the whole thing here, but recommend you *run* and get it from any good comp-science bookshop. There are many pages of technique and philosophy...

Chapter 1 - The Tar Pit

Section: The {Joys, Woes} of the Craft

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner afford?

First is...

[...large amount of pertinent material deleted for brevity...]

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realising grand conceptual structures (...)

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet's words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

There are levels of appreciation of all things; I read a novel and do not extract from it the flavours and nuance that a literary critic may do; likewise I should not expect a lawyer to understand the elegance and significance of:

perl -nle 'setpwent;crypt($_,$c)eq$c&&print"$u=$_"while($u,$ c)=getpwent'

...and that my discovery/creation of this gem led me to phenomenal, near poetic personal joy of accomplishment and achievement of elegance, not to mention an unofficial world record.

(Incidentally - the above was created as a rebuttal to the stated "extreme complexity" of writing password-cracking security programs as cited in Boalt Hall `High Technology Law Review 10:2' from 1995 - in a paper in which I acted as a resource for an author, and now wish I had not because I consider the rest of the report to be substandard that I would approve.)

Programming is closer to poerty and art than any other engineering discipline, with the possible exception of architecture - but who's gonna believe a bunch of geeks who say this?

Cite Brooks. At least he might have some weight.

- alec